Are Women Really The “Choosier” Sex?

Conventional wisdom tells us that women tend to be “choosier” than men when it comes to selecting sexual and romantic partners, and there is plenty of scientific evidence to back up this idea. Evolutionary psychologists believe there is good reason for it too: Because producing a child requires a significantly greater investment of one’s body and time for women than it does for men, it is in women’s best interests to be more selective about their partners to ensure they do not wind up getting pregnant by someone who might leave them high and dry.¹ But is female choosiness really an inevitable fact of life in the heterosexual mating marketplace? Recent research suggests this may not necessarily be the case.  

The traditional heterosexual dating script dictates that men should approach women, not the other way around. As a result, women are ultimately approached more frequently than men. Thus, if women are the ones constantly being put in the position of having to choose, it should come as no surprise that they tend to be more selective. So what would happen if the roles were reversed? If women were the ones doing the approaching, would men suddenly become choosier?

This idea was tested in a recent speed-dating study.² For those of you who aren’t familiar with speed-dating, the basic idea is that a large number of single people come together in one place and then proceed to pair off for several brief mini-dates. Specifically, people will usually rotate from table to table for a series of short (i.e., two or three minute) conversations with complete strangers. In one speed-dating session, each person involved may have 20 or more of these brief "dates." Based only upon these encounters, speed daters later decide who (if anyone) they would like to take on a real date afterward. In this particular study, the researchers manipulated who got up at the end of each encounter to move to the next table (i.e., who was doing the approaching). Half of the time it was the men, and the other half of the time it was the women.

When the men were approaching women, it was business as usual in the sense that women were significantly choosier than men. However, when women were the ones approaching men, this sex difference in selectivity disappeared completely! The sex difference did not truly reverse itself (i.e., we did not see men become more selective than women). Instead, men and women simply became equally selective in this case.

These findings suggest that choosiness may not be an innate part of female psychology, but rather a product of a highly gendered society that dictates who should be the initiator of sexual and romantic encounters. Although these findings do not necessarily rule out the evolutionary explanation, they do offer the provocative possibility that women may only be the choosier sex because that’s the way we expect them to be, not because that's the way they are by nature.

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¹Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: A contextual evolutionary analysis of human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.

²Finkel, E. J., & Eastwick, P. W. (2009). Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity. Psychological Science, 20, 1290–1295.

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Comments

[Dave S.]

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but the actual findings in that study did NOT involve a cross-over interaction. That is, for gender to be unimportant in choosiness, women approaching should have been just as interested as when men approached. Which was not the case. As the authors noted "this sex difference did not significantly reverse at events where women rotated, so on average there was at least an overall trend in the present data for men to experience greater romantic approach (i.e., to be less selective) than women." In addition, one has to consider what happens in the real world. Is it the case that men usually approach women for sexual solicitations (and not vice versa)? If so, evolution could rely on this "approach mechanism" to do its bidding. That is, the eagerness may be entirely due to approach behavior (which they actually found it is not), but men may be designed by evolution to approach more. All that said, it's a great study design and the authors point out some of these limitations of interpretation, but also reasonably assert there could be many other seemingly "arbitrary" behaviors (such as approach) that contribute to the sex difference in eagerness. All combined, these "arbitrary" behaviors might totally swamp out gender as a cause of eagerness. Interesting possbility (with caveats that evolution may not consider these arbitrary)!

[Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller]

Hi, Dave.

Thanks very much for your comments. You are absolutely right that the authors did not obtain a cross-over interaction, and I apologize if I made it sound that way—that wasn’t my intention! I will add another sentence in to clarify that while the sex difference in selectivity disappeared, it did not reverse itself. You provide one possibility for why the sex difference did not reverse, but there are other possibilities too, as the authors of the study note (e.g., a long history of experience with these social norms may be difficult to completely overcome with a simple lab manipulation).

You also make an excellent point regarding the “real world” implications of this study. Although I find the speed-dating paradigm to be truly novel and fascinating, there are some legitimate concerns about its external validity. It is an artificial scenario that, among other thing, may actually encourage greater selectivity by both men and women because the participants are guaranteed a certain number of “dates” (which, unfortunately, isn’t the case in real life!). You (and the study’s authors) are right too in that there are likely a number of other factors beyond approach underlying sex differences in selectivity (or lack thereof). Thus, this one study certainly does not rule out the evolutionary explanation by any stretch of the imagination. Thanks again for providing your perspective!

-Justin