ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
What do men want? Re-examining whether men benefit from higher fertility than is optimal for women.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fertility intentions in the era of the new three-child policy in China: a cross-sectional survey of married adults of reproductive age.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Sex ratios and gender norms: why both are needed to understand sexual conflict in humans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Sexual conflict over sex-an underappreciated consequence of childbirth?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Gendered conflict in the human family.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Testing evolutionary conflict theories for sexual and physical intimate partner violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- He for she? Variation and exaggeration in men's support for women's empowerment in northern Tanzania.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Fertility intentions and outcomes in Indonesia: Evolutionary perspectives on sexual conflict.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Sex Composition of Children and Spousal Sexual Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.Maternal and child health journal · 2019Article
- Indirect questioning method reveals hidden support for female genital cutting in South Central Ethiopia.PloS one · 2018Article
- Does Sexual Conflict between Mother and Father Lead to Fertility Decline? : A Questionnaire Survey in a Modern Developed Society.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- The offspring quantity-quality trade-off and human fertility variation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Understanding variation in human fertility: what can we learn from evolutionary demography?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Grandparental co-residence and grandchild survival: the role of resource competition in a pre-industrial population.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several empirical observations suggest that when women have more autonomy over their reproductive decisions, fertility is lower. Some evolutionary theorists have interpreted this as evidence for sexual conflicts of interest, arguing that higher fertility is more adaptive for men than women. We suggest the assumptions underlying these arguments are problematic: assuming that women suffer higher costs of reproduction than men neglects the (different) costs of reproduction for men; the assumption that men can repartner is often false. We use simple models to illustrate that (i) menorwomen can prefer longer interbirth intervals (IBIs), (ii) if men can only partner with wives sequentially they may favour shorter IBIs than women, but such a strategy would only be optimal for a few men who can repartner. This suggests that an evolved universal male preference for higher fertility than women prefer is implausible and is unlikely to fully account for the empirical data. This further implies that if women have more reproductive autonomy, populations should grow, not decline. More precise theoretical explanations with clearly stated assumptions, and data that better address both ultimate fitness consequences and proximate psychological motivations, are needed to understand under which conditions sexual conflict over reproductive timing should arise.
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