Throughout history, 80% of women have reproduced an offspring while only 40% of men have done the same. Why is that?

22 comments

1. Where are you getting these stats? They sound very made up…

2. It seems to suggest men fathered children with multiple women.

3. Women tend to have sex with men that other women are interested in, for one reason or another.

   Also in a lot of cultures for financial or religious reasons one dude has like 20 wives..

4. They’re hoes

5. Pretty simple:

   Men can impregnate a *virtually* infinite number of different women over their lifetime, whereas women can only only get conceive a child with, *at most*, maybe 25 different men over their life. In practical terms, though, even 25 is unquestionably farthest outlier to the point of absurdity, and I’d bet that 99% of women conceive children from 3 different fathers at most.

   In more simple, typical terms, women tend bear children from 1 man, and that one man probably also fathered children with other women.

6. What is the source of this data?

7. Young men mostly went to war and never came back. No chance to have offspring.

8. More boys die very young.

   More men have kids with several different women than women with several different men.

9. Historically men have had more wives than woman had husbands.

10. the biggest and baddest guy can act like a walrus on a beach and claim up the most productive territories and chase off the other males. The modern era of food and department stores and working for wages is new. We use to personally have to catch, hunt, or grow most of what we ate; so women were in a share-or-starve scenario.

11. They’re pickier than we are

12. The majority of women are attracted to the same men.

13. This strikes me as improbable to the point of absurdity, unless it’s going very, very far back into human history. According to the CDC, by age 40, 85% of women and about 80% of men have reproduced.

    https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr113.pdf

14. Just look up the good old lock and key analogy. It’s fun, share it at a party.

15. Man 1:
    Average attractive, boring lifestyle, no extra money, can afford to raise kids but not optimally, can only kind of protect them. You get this man all to yourself.

    Man 2:
    Very attractive, exciting lifestyle, more money than you can count, can afford to raise kids optimally, has staff to protect them. You have to share this man.

    ​

    Most women pick man 2.

16. Same reason young men still die more. There’s 106 boys born for every 100 women, by age 18 the numbers are equal.

    And that’s in the modern world with all the healthcare and relative safety.

    Boys are more likely to participate in risk taking behaviour, which causes them to die. Historically this was far worse as it weren’t any emergency care options and there was considerably more danger around. And we haven’t gotten around to wars yet with that.

    So lots of young men die, the women don’t die as much, the women fuck the men who aren’t dead.

17. Women are out banging the same guy

18. A couple of men like Genghis Khan can easily reduce the percentage of men who reproduced in not so distant times. Also Prima Nocta and everything.That number seems to be way off for more recent times.

19. Men will smash anything…lower standards…while women won’t.

20. Lots of gay men?

21. Natural selection?

22. One factor, but definitely not the whole equation, is evolution. Male genes show more mutations which can lead to higher or lower than average adaptiveness to the environment they grow up in (which would hint to us why men still are the peak performers in almost all fields of activities but also the absolute worse in basically all fields we cared to look at).

    Also men tended to die protecting their wives and children for quite some time. That would leave them with less time to procreate.

    And harems definitely also contributed to that (e.g. the forbidden city in China to my knowledge hosted various concubines with all guards being eunuchs to ensure that they wouldn’t procreate)

    If you find a conclusive paper about what factors contributed and by which metric this conclusion exactly was established, feel free to share it!