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).

With his knowledge of sexual selection would Charles Darwin have cleaned up on Tinder?

Given that sexual reproduction is how genes are propagated into future generations, sexual selection plays a large role in evolution, and is responsible for adaptations that do not make sense through natural selection alone, such as the peacock’s elaborate and costly plumage, which represented a problem for Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and made him physically sick to contemplate (Darwin, 1859). Sexual selection explains how seemingly maladaptive traits can evolve when they are preferred by mates, and from a ‘’gene’s-eye-view’’, is just as important as survival, as there is little point in survival if your genes do not get passed on (Dawkins, 1976; Andersson, 1987; Miller, 2000). Weatherhead and Robertson (1979) expand on the theory of sexual selection with the ‘’sexy-sons’’ hypothesis, outlining that the ideal mate-choice is one whose genes will produce male-offspring that other females will find attractive as mates. The dominant mate-choice model in evolutionary literature has been one of ‘’males-compete, females-choose’’, although Stewart-Williams and Thomas (2013)…