Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences
“How an evolutionary perspective can help us understand cross-cultural consistency and variation in mate preferences, and how these preferences interact with and contribute to variation in gender roles and equality across cultures.”
This essay outlines the proximate and ultimate importance of mate-choice, offering evolutionary insights into cross-cultural consistency and variation in mate preferences. The paper will then explore how these preferences interact with and contribute to variation in gender roles and equality cross-culturally, specifically the culturally skewed sex-ratio of economically successful women, to economically unattractive men, in WEIRD societies.
Mate-choice is one of the most important decisions humans make in both the proximate (more immediately relevant) and ultimate (evolutionary reproductive-fitness consequences) levels of analysis (Tinbergen, 1963). Mate-choice impacts physical and mental health (Braithwaite et al., 2010; Robles et al., 2014), financial success (Antonovics & Town, 2014), and functions as a social signal of status (Winegard et al., 2017). We build billion-dollar industries around mate-choice in dating apps (Curry, 2021) and cosmetic surgery to attract mates (Nassab & Harris, 2013).
Given that sexual reproduction is how genes are propagated into future generations, sexual…
