Women tend to also process visuals differently. I do think I've seen data that show men's eyes tend to be more sensitive to movement while women tend to have better color recognition on average. Movement is often also detectable in the periphery.

So when women look at dark areas they may see more things there in color, this may create a sort of feedback loop for night time visual behavior in addition to obvious sociological concerns.

The way to test for a visual feedback loop would probably be to evaluate night time driving (or other safer conditions) differences to see if women tend to look more at low light areas.

Alternately you could put men and women out in the woods and see if their behavior aligns.