I was a little surprised to learn that historically, the percentage of parents that are fathers is not 50%. According to this source, today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
My question is this:
What is the ratio today in the United States? My guess is that it’s closer to 50%, but still imbalanced.
For one thing, there are many more female single-parent households than male.
Just for clarification, I’m talking about biological parentage. So a child in a female single-parent household still has a father.
Oh. So if a man fathers children with each of two women, you’ve got one father and two mothers. Is that more common than one mother and two fathers?
Well I imagine the sex ratio in the US is about 1:1. So I guess the question is which gender has more members who remain childless.
My guess is males, based soley on the fact that there’s a higher incidence of homosexuality in American males then females, and while I’m aware some gay men still manage to sire children, my impression is that a fair number don’t.
So we have more mothers then fathers.
Assuming that the question is actually “What % of women are biological parents, and what % of men are biological parents?”, the answer is harder to come up with than you might think. It looks like about 80% of US women will eventually have a baby (see Fertility of American Women ). However, estimates of how many men will eventually have a baby aren’t as good, and unfortunately I can’t find one online right now. Fertility researchers usually research women’s fertility because data quality is better - men are much more likely to either not know if they’ve reproduced or forget that they’ve reproduced.
My recollection is that the consensus seems to be that men are more likely to reproduced with multiple women than women are with multiple men. Therefore, it seems like a good guess that a higher percentage of women will be mothers than men will be fathers. Sorry I don’t have any cites!
Yeah, what if a woman has children by, say, 3 different guys, each of whom have children by at least one other woman? What happens then?
(My brain explodes, that’s what.) :smack:
I see 3 men and at least 4 women as parents in this scene, assuming no overlap. As written, there could be as few as two women.
If there is a societal imbalance, I’d say it’s because many men father no children, while some men father children with more than one woman.
I agree that intuitively, there ought to be an imbalance. For example, we’ve all heard the cliche about the middle aged guy who dumps his first wife, gets taken to the cleaners in divorce court, and starts a new family with some young hottie. How often does that happen in real life? I don’t know, but it’s certainly not unheard of.
Also, many outcomes that prevent a person from reproducing (or make it more unlikely), such as dying in an accident, being murdered, spending one’s youth in jail, or being gay, are more likely to be visited on men than than women.
Here are some quotes I found:
So it seems like there still is an imbalance, but it’s not as extreme as in the past.