Quantifying gender preferences across humans lifespan

TL;DR

This study analyzes mobile phone communication data to understand how gender and age influence social interaction patterns, revealing age-dependent preferences, opposite-sex bonding during reproductive years, and generational calling trends.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of gender and age effects on human social interactions using large-scale mobile phone data, highlighting new patterns like grandmothering and downward affection flows.

Findings

Strong age dependence in calling preferences.

Opposite sex bonding peaks during reproductive age.

Older women tend to call younger females, suggesting grandmothering.

Abstract

In human relations individuals' gender and age play a key role in the structures and dynamics of their social arrangements. In order to analyze the gender preferences of individuals in interaction with others at different stages of their lives we study a large mobile phone dataset. To do this we consider four fundamental gender-related caller and callee combinations of human interactions, namely male to male, male to female, female to male, and female to female, which together with age, kinship, and different levels of friendship give rise to a wide scope of human sociality. Here we analyse the relative strength of these four types of interaction using a large dataset of mobile phone communication records. Our analysis suggests strong age dependence for an ego of one gender choosing to call an individual of either gender. We observe a strong opposite sex bonding across most of their reproductive age. However, older women show a strong tendency to connect to another female that is one generation younger in a way that is suggestive of the \emph{grandmothering effect}. We also find that the relative strength among the four possible interactions depends on phone call duration. For calls of medium and long duration, opposite gender interactions are significantly more probable than same gender interactions during the reproductive years, suggesting potential emotional exchange between spouses. By measuring the fraction of calls to other generations we find that mothers tend to make calls more to their daughters than to their sons, whereas fathers make calls more to their sons than to their daughters. For younger people, most of their calls go to same generation alters, while older people call the younger people more frequently, which supports the suggestion that \emph{affection flows downward}.