When men are scarce, good men are even harder to find: Life history, the sex ratio, and the proportion of men married.

Abstract

We used a life history framework to clarify the relationship between the operational sex ratio (OSR) and the proportion of men who are married across adulthood. Previous studies have found a direct relationship between the OSR and the likelihood of male marriage, although these analyses did not distinguish among age groups. We predicted that more women than men would be married at younger ages, but women would be less likely to be married than men in later adulthood, reflecting age related trends in male and female reproductive values. We predicted that men would use scarcity in a low sex ratio population to their advantage differentially by age, being less likely to marry while young but having higher marital rates than women in older age. This would be consistent with the shift from mating effort to parental investment across the male life course which is apparent in modern societies. Census data from the ten largest metropolitan areas in the United States supported these hypotheses.