The rising female:male life expectancy ratio is interesting, because it instinctively strikes me as absurd—there should be some feedback loop that pushes them back towards similar numbers—but it’s not clear to me this intuition is much more than status quo bias.
Somewhat relatedly, you might find this interesting: research estimating generation length over history for both sexes. Surprisingly to me, they find massive variation over time; ~30,000 years ago the average generation length was around 24 for women, but more like 33 for men vs around 26 more recently, a very large difference. It’s not the same metric, but related in that it suggests another way in which historically sexual parity forces were not that strong and tolerated considerable variation over time.
Interesting work, thanks!
The rising female:male life expectancy ratio is interesting, because it instinctively strikes me as absurd—there should be some feedback loop that pushes them back towards similar numbers—but it’s not clear to me this intuition is much more than status quo bias.
Somewhat relatedly, you might find this interesting: research estimating generation length over history for both sexes. Surprisingly to me, they find massive variation over time; ~30,000 years ago the average generation length was around 24 for women, but more like 33 for men vs around 26 more recently, a very large difference. It’s not the same metric, but related in that it suggests another way in which historically sexual parity forces were not that strong and tolerated considerable variation over time.