Has anyone worked this out yet
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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most women reproduce. most men don't.
it's not anything new.
The divine feminine movement is coming...
(I even read the article and still have no idea what they are trying to say)
I only know of one man to have a child...
It's kind of a trivial observation: the higher the ratio of men to women, the lower the male fertility rate is relative to the female one, since the number of babies born is, of necessity, equal. For more detail, you need to look at relative birth rates and relative mortality rates, both sliced and diced into age cohorts. The scientists also broke it down by geographic regions.
Meaning now it's slightly more likely I will have kids with 2 guys, than it is that my man will have kids with me & someone else?
What social implications do they mean?
"The key finding is that we are observing a shift from a higher total fertility rate among men to a higher total fertility rate among women, which has occurred globally in 2024. This shift is driven by an increase in the proportion of men in the population,' explains Schubert, a researcher at the MPIDR. Schubert and his colleagues attribute this to long-term trends such as falling mortality, narrowing mortality gaps between women and men, and the link to sex-selective abortions in some countries."
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!
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.
If that is supported by data, that would be the more deserving headline.
I think the headline as-is isn't the best for sure, but I don't know that "there are more men in the world than women" is much better, since it's got such a major asterisk.
It's fairly dramatic.
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.
Why would you use the fertility rates of men and women to measure the proportion of men and women at different ages in the population? Why wouldn't you just measure the proportions directly?
This seems to be saying that a lower percentage of men are having kids than women?
Dudes dig milfs
I just finished watching the Frankie Fey video about MPreg and now this
Has anyone dug into this enough to work out what exactly is the difference in measuring fertility rate vs gender compared to just measuring population percentage per gender? It's got to be a very subtle difference, if anything.
Reproductive-age populations show a growing male surplus around the globe as aconsequence of declining mortality, narrowing sex differences in mortality, and sex-selective abortions in some countries. Population structures are important determinantsof marriage markets and childbearing. In this study, we estimate the past, current, andfuture difference between the male and the female total fertility rates around the worldusing an established indirect demographic approach drawing on data from the UNWorld Population Prospects. Our results indicate a crossover from historically highermale fertility to increasingly higher female fertility, which occurs globally in 2024.This shift is not toward parity, but rather reflects a growing disparity driven by theincreasing male surplus at reproductive ages, which exerts downward pressure on malefertility rates relative to those of women. The difference is expected to grow to up to20% in countries like China and India, where sex-selective abortion has reinforced seximbalances in population structures. Overall, we highlight the growing sex inequalitiesin reproduction and call for more research on sex differences in fertility.
Maybe due to a rise in artificial insemination - women being able to become mothers without a partner and men obviously cannot do the same?