- Aug 24, 2001
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A man's riches, not his looks, are most important if he wants to settle down, according to a pioneering study of the "marriage market" by psychologists.
Although there have been many lab based studies that have suggested that women are drawn to men of high status, power and wealth, rather than just looks, a new study provides hard evidence of the marriage market in action.
The survey of more than 20,000 American men, based on historical data from the turn of the last century, suggests how when men become in short supply, for instance in the wake of the First World War, women are happy to put up with poorer partners of lesser social sway.
And when men are commonplace, women are in the driving seat and become correspondingly more choosy, driving a hard bargain for the richest and most powerful men, with the marriage prospects of a male pauper being "drastically reduced".
The findings back a prediction made more than a decade ago that also said men will become more faithful to their wives and take more interest in their children when women are in short supply.
The revelations have come from a study of US data from 1910, where the ratio of men to women varies from state to state, published in the journal Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University.
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"Little research within evolutionary psychology, so far, has considered how 'the market' influences individual decisions," said Mr Pollet.
"Here we show that if men are abundant, this will influence the market value of their desired traits, that is, women can demand more. This aspect, namely individual decision making as a function of the mating market (local abundance or scarcity), has been relatively neglected within the literature on human mate choice."
When men and women are in equal supply, mathematical models predict that men who are married will have a slightly higher socioeconomic status than unmarried men.
"As the sex ratio increases, married men are predicted to need up two or three times the socioeconomic status of unmarried men".
To illustrate what they mean by this, they took the example of a 30 year old with a low and a high socioeconomic status. With equal numbers of men and women theory predicts that 56 per cent of low status men would be married once, whereas 60 per cent of high status men would.
But when men are plentiful, so there are 11 for every 10 women, only 24 per cent of low status men would be married once, compared with 46 per cent of high status men. Thus low status men become 2.31 times less likely to marry, whereas high status men are 1.31 times less likely.
And as there are more men, the effect of wealth and power on the probability of marriage became stronger. "This means that the effects of a male-biased sex ratio fell disproportionately on low-status men, whose probability of marriage was drastically reduced."
The work confirms a prediction made by Frank Pedersen of the University of Delaware in 1991 that the sex ratio has a big impact on the marriage market.
Pedersen suggested that people will change many aspects of their behaviour as a knock-on effect of the competition induced by sex ratio fluctuations. For men, these include greater fidelity, commitment to careers, and increased investment in children when women are scarce.
"Thus, much about the varying ethos of male and female behaviour across populations and across time could in principle be explained with reference to the sex ratio," said Mr. Pollet.
"These questions are ripe for future investigation, but our study has clearly established the more limited fact that sex ratio fluctuations in modern humans can put one sex in the driving seat and allow them to drive a hard bargain."