ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The potential pitfalls of studying adult sex ratios at aggregate levels in humans.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. 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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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Skewed sex ratios and violence against women in Pakistan.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Sex ratios and gender norms: why both are needed to understand sexual conflict in humans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Adult sex ratios: causes of variation and implications for animal and human societies.Communications biology · 2022Review
- Too Many Males or Too Many Females? Classroom Sex Ratio, Life History Strategies and Risk-Taking Behaviors.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2022Article
- Preference for Stronger Taste Associated with a Higher Risk of Hypertension: Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Study in Northwest China.International journal of hypertension · 2022Article
- Sex ratios and union formation in the historical population of the St. Lawrence Valley.PloS one · 2022Article
- Sex differences in human mate preferences vary across sex ratios.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Do Local Sex Ratios Approximate Subjective Partner Markets? : Evidence from the German Family Panel.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Multi-level modelling of time-series cross-sectional data reveals the dynamic interaction between ecological threats and democratic development.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Adult sex ratio and social status predict mating and parenting strategies in Northern Ireland.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Adult sex ratios and reproductive strategies: a critical re-examination of sex differences in human and animal societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Female-biased sex ratios in urban centers create a "fertility trap" in post-war Finland.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Operational Sex Ratio Predicts Binge Drinking Across U.S. Counties.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human adult sex ratios have been studied extensively across the biological and social sciences. While several studies have examined adult sex ratio effects in a multilevel perspective, many studies have focused on effects at an aggregated level only. In this paper, we review some key issues relating to such analyses. We address not only nation-level analyses, but also aggregation at lower levels, to investigate whether these issues extend to lower levels of aggregation. We illustrate these issues with novel databases covering a broad range of variables. Specifically, we discuss distributional issues with aggregated measures of adult sex ratio, significance testing, and statistical non-independence when using aggregate data. Firstly, we show that there are severe distributional issues with national adult sex ratio, such as extreme cases. Secondly, we demonstrate that many 'meaningless' variables are significantly correlated with adult sex ratio (e.g. the max. elevation level correlates with sex ratio at US state level). Finally, we re-examine associations between adult sex ratios and teenage fertility and find no robust evidence for an association at the aggregate level. Our review highlights the potential issues of using aggregate data on adult sex ratios to test hypotheses from an evolutionary perspective in humans.This article is part of the themed issue 'Adult sex ratios and reproductive decisions: a critical re-examination of sex differences in human and animal societies'.
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