Synonyms
Definition
When men can have multiple female partners, the ratio of available women to available men in a population is reduced compared to the raw population proportions.
Introduction
Most mammalian species are polygynous, where a male can simultaneously have several female mates (Reichard and Boesch 2003). In polygynous species, male reproductive success is more highly skewed than female reproductive success, both because of high status males with multiple mates and because fewer potential partners are available to lower-status males.
Reproductive Dynamics
The operational sex ratio (OSR) was defined across species as the number of sexually active males per 100 sexually receptive females in a particular population (Emlen and Oring 1977). Researchers have operationally defined the human sex ratio in terms of raw population counts (e.g., Barber 2000) and as an effective sex ratio in the mating market, e.g., the ratio of unmarried men to unmarried women (e.g.,...
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References
Barber, N. (2000). On the relationship between country sex ratios and teen pregnancy rates: A replication. Cross-Cultural Research, 34, 26–37.
Betzig, L. (1986). Despotism and differential reproduction: A Darwinian view of history. Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter.
Ember, M., Ember, C. R., & Low, B. S. (2007). Comparing explanations of polygyny. Cross-Cultural Research, 41, 428–440.
Emlen, S., & Oring, L. (1977). Ecology, sexual selection, and the evolution of mating systems. Science, 197, 215–223.
Fisher, R. A. (1930). The genetical theory of natural selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hendrix, L. (1996). Illegitimacy and social structures: Cross-cultural perspectives on nonmarital birth. Westport: Greenwood.
Kruger, D. J. (2010). Socio-demographic factors intensifying male mating competition exacerbate male mortality rates. Evolutionary Psychology, 8, 194–204.
Kruger, D. J., Fitzgerald, C. J., & Peterson, T. (2010). Female scarcity reduces women’s marital ages and increases variance in men’s marital ages. Evolutionary Psychology, 8, 420–431.
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Pollet, T. V., & Nettle, D. (2007). Driving a hard bargain: Sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population. Biology Letters, 4, 31–33.
Reichard, U., & Boesch, C. (Eds.). (2003). Monogamy: Mating strategies and partnerships in birds, humans, and other mammals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Kruger, D. (2018). Polygyny and Effective Population Sex Ratio. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2021-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2021-1
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