Researchers investigated whether men or women have fewer children. Using international datasets, they demonstrate that imbalances in population structure, particularly an increasing proportion of men, affect male fertility. While men used to have higher fertility than women globally, this has reversed, and women have and will have a higher fertility rate than men. The scientists offer recommendations to counteract the social implications of this trend.
Okay, I need to figure out the math on “Men have fewer children than women,” and I want to do it before I read the article.
So we’ve got Adam, Ben, Carlos, Denise, Eve, and Freida. Adam and Eve only have two kids and only with each other. Ben has one kid with Denise. Carlos has one kid with Denise and two kids with Freida. So there are six children (twelve parentage relationships): Ben has only one kid, but Adam, Denise, Eve, and Freida all have two kids, and Carlos has three kids. In this population, men and women each have an average of two kids. No matter what I do with the math, I can’t figure out a way that a child born to a woman doesn’t count as a child born to a man as well, which would push the average for the gender up.
I see two possible ways to reconcile this.
First, it could be that they’re analyzing the data and saying that there are way more men who are fathers of only one child than there are mothers of only one child, and so there are statistically speaking also a few men who are fathering a lot of kids with a lot of women to balance out the math; maybe we have Gary, Harvey, Isaias, Jenny, Katrina, and Louisa; and Gary has two kids with Jenny and one kid each with Katrina, and Louisa, but Harvey has one kid with Katrina and Isaias has one kid with Louisa. Again there are six kids and twelve parentage relationships, and again there are an average of two kids per person (male or female), but Gary has four kids while Harvey and Isaias each only have one. The number of men with only one child is much greater than the number of women with only one child.
It also could be that I’m misunderstanding the headline. I am assuming that there’s an unwritten “Men who have children at all have fewer children than women who have children at all,” but it’s not actually saying that and it might not even be what it means. Maybe we’re looking at Mike, Nirav, Oliver, Patty, and Renee; Mike has two kids with Patty and two kids with Renee, but Nirav and Oliver don’t have any kids. In this population, each man has an average of 1.33 kids while each woman has an average of 2 kids. But that just sounds like it’s saying that there are more adult men in the world than there are adult women, which I know isn’t true.
Okay, time to read the article.
I know a guy that has 4 kids with 3 women. That would be a 3:1 ratio and that’s the type of situation that I interpreted this as. I didn’t think of it as the man had 4 kids and that was amortized across 3 women, just true or false on having children.
I feel like that headline would be “There are more mothers than fathers,” but in any case that statistic doesn’t work because there aren’t three women for every man in the world; you’re just cherry-picking one arbitrary and asymmetrical slice of the population. There are, for all intents and purposes, one woman for every one man; so to get the stats for your scenario, you also have to include two more statistical men, and even if they each have zero children, the average number of kids per man and the average number of kids per woman is going to be the same at 1.33.
But what this article is saying is that there’s actually very slightly more adult men in the world than adult women, which means that the burden to bear more children per adult is falling disproportionately on women. Which is kind of like what you’re saying, though in a much, much bigger aggregate.
So I guess what I’m saying is you’re kind of right!
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Okay, so actually it turns out that there are more adult men in the world than adult women, at least of parenting age. So, since there are still globally about 2% more women than men, that must mean that the gender disparity in life expectancy is more dramatic than I thought.
It’s fairly dramatic.
More men are born (but only a few percent) and we die earlier, probably because testosterone is a helluva drug. Also wars I guess.
Difference in life expectancy is usually 5-7 years in most countries.
There is one way that “one man and one woman” wouldn’t be true, and that’s the trans community. Then again, I’m pretty sure the article isn’t thinking about that.
That’s already a small enough community, and so few members of that community become parents, that I agree it seems unlikely to be a factor in any broader research.