Why Women Over 40 Experience a Man Shortage (article on Economics of Sex)

At last, I think I know why so many women over 40 are experiencing a ‘man shortage’

William Leith
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 January 2009

Article history

This week, I read an extract from a book called How To Meet A Man After Forty, and this got me thinking about the “man shortage”, and what it actually means. Of course, there is no actual shortage of men, and I’ll come to that in a moment. But there is definitely a perceived shortage of men. Anyway, the author of the book, Shane Watson, seems to agree with this perception. “Pick your man,” she writes. “Don’t wait for him to find you.” She also says, “Flirt and then some. However much you think you are flirting, double it.”

I once read a statistic that a 40-year-old single woman in New York was more likely to be killed by terrorists than to find a husband. Admittedly, this turned out to be untrue, and it was, if I remember, later retracted. But still, it all adds to the myth. Something must be going on, right?

Actually, two things are going on. One is biological, and it can’t be helped, and the other has to do with economics, and it’s pretty sinister. The biological thing is the usual story of sperm and eggs. Men, as we know, make billions of sperm and don’t get pregnant.

So they can pass on their genes by having sex with anybody who looks fertile. Women, on the other hand, do get pregnant, so they need to be much more cautious. What they’re looking for is a kind, loving guy with access to resources.

All this stuff is hard-wired in our brains. But here’s the thing – what it means is that men tend to be attracted to slightly younger partners (who have more years of fertility ahead of them), whereas women tend to be attracted to slightly older partners (who have demonstrated themselves as good providers).

You don’t have to believe me on this: David Buss, possibly the world’s foremost authority on human evolutionary biology, conducted a study in 37 cultures, in which more than 10,000 people were questioned. What he found was that “In all 37 cultures . . . women prefer men who are older than they are.”

And this has an obvious meaning for young people. Among young men, there tends to be a shortage of women, because a huge proportion of the women are attracted to older guys with better resources – cars, say, or money. Conversely, among young women, there tends to be a glut of male suitors. And when one of those young women chooses an older man, she is not just leaving a young man on the shelf, she is depleting the pool of mates available to her older sisters.

The reason that the man shortage has become the perceived reality is that women in their late 30s write books and newspaper columns, whereas men in their early 20s tend not to. They just sit around talking to their mates about football and cars. And then, when they get to their late 30s, they sleep with lots of younger women, and sit around talking to their mates about football and cars. And somewhere, deep in these male brains, will be the notion that getting fatter and balder seems to make you more attractive to women. Funny, that.

So, if there’s a woman shortage, followed by a man shortage, why don’t they balance each other out? You’d think they would, wouldn’t you, if only to demonstrate some sort of divine justice. But they don’t. Women, roughly speaking, have it easier in their 20s, and men in their 30s. But in the last couple of decades, the mating game has been pushed into older territory, which, of course, favours men. Why has this happened? Because, in a highly geared economy, with its high levels of debt and low levels of job security, with the need to overwork and to keep on overworking for years on end, people can’t afford to even think about settling down until much later in life.

So that’s what’s causing the man shortage. It’s the economy. I think the economy might look quite a lot different in the years to come. And, who knows – that might give things a bit more balance.

• For the last few months, I’ve been writing a book on economics. At first, I wanted to concentrate on what a bad idea all this lending and borrowing was – being rich with fake money was making us greedy, overworked and depressed. It was corroding us spiritually, and, what’s more, an economy that needed to grow in order to stay alive was bound to burst in the end. My book was going to be a sort of warning.

Then things changed. Oh well, I thought, when they patch up the economy and start all the lending and borrowing again, I can still say, ‘Look, this is terrible – don’t you see that you won’t always be able to fix this machine; one day, there will be a terrible, terrible crash, and everybody will lose their money, and we’ll be taking cash to the shops in wheelbarrows?’

And now what? This was the first week I could sense real fear. Things might happen, right here, that we have never seriously contemplated. Like what? I have no idea. But maybe it’s the best time, ever, to be writing a book on economics. And that really scares me.