Lifehistory Trade-Offs Influence Women’s Reproductive Strategies
R. I.M. Dunbar, Sara Grainger

TL;DR
Women from lower socioeconomic classes in the UK tend to start reproducing earlier to balance differences in survival and fertility rates.
Contribution
The study introduces a Monte-Carlo model showing how socioeconomic disparities influence reproductive timing strategies in women.
Findings
Lower SES women must start reproducing 5.65 years earlier to match family size parity with higher SES women.
The model closely predicts observed differences in age at first reproduction based on census data.
Early reproduction may be a necessary strategy for lower SES women due to higher mortality and infertility risks.
Abstract
In a UK national census sample, women from the upper and lower socioeconomic (SES) classes achieve parity in completed family size, despite marked differences in both birth rates and offspring survival rates. We test the hypothesis that women adopt reproductive strategies that manipulate age at first reproduction to achieve this. We use a Monte-Carlo modeling approach parameterized with current UK lifehistory data to simulate the reproductive lifehistories of 64,000 individuals from different SES classes, with parameter values at each successive time step drawn from a statistical distribution defined by the census data. We show that, if they are to achieve parity with women in the higher socioeconomic classes, women in lower socioeconomic classes must begin reproducing 5.65 years earlier on average than women in the higher SES classes in order to offset the higher class-specific…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDemographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Family Dynamics and Relationships
