That's not an but a female thing.
My husband is a very good navigator, but there are very bad navigators who are men and very good ones who are women, so it's just not a male / female thing, IMO.
I navigate by landmarks, but if an area is unfamiliar I can drive around for a long time to find my way unless I stop and ask for directions.
My husband apparently has a compass in his brain, so he navigates by knowing what direction to travel and he can find his way in an unfamiliar place without directions.
Fortunately for me, GPS navigation devices have become much less expensive.
It's not a compass, but I believe it may be related to some Gaussian parallel flux line sensitivity phenomenon. I was blessed, but so is my wife and I have no reason to add, "... for a girl." Where she DOES have difficulty is in instinctively knowing how far she has traveled. She has often miscalculated by huge proportions of the required distances in following accurate directions.
If you want a cool GPS unit, there are products which feature, touch screeen menus, Bluetooth, hands-free cell phone linking, built-in iPod docking, satellite radio, internet, wireless FM transmission to your mobile AV receiver unit to play your iPod (or you can cable up to your receiver, so you can play videos from your iPod), cellphone and the vocal GPS instructions through your car stereo. Some even link to a satellite in real time to retrieve up-to-the-minute traffic information where it's available. Those aren't cheap!
... or you can get a basic do-nothing unit with programmed maps for about one hundred eighty bucks