14 DAY TRIAL // Which man in this world is not jealous of Hugh Hefner? It is a fact that men prefer younger women as mates, and women want by their side an older man. This male preference is universal across cultures.
Now, a scientific reason has been found: it boosts the evolutionary success. In short, the number of children an individual produces along his lifespan. The new research was made by Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber, a married couple of anthropologists at the University of Vienna, Austria.
The team employed data from a massive demographic database of Swedish baby boomers born between 1945 and 1955, choosing 10,000 men and women who had married just once. The difference of age in those couples was correlated with their number of children.
The researchers claimed that if the couples made of older man-younger woman had more children, this would point to a genetic natural selection that turn women more attracted to older men and vice-versa. This evolutionary connection was evident when the researchers worked on the data: couples in which the husband was approximately 5 years older had 5% more descendants than same-age couples.
"That may not sound like much for a family unit, but it represents a "huge" effect on the evolutionary time scale," said Fieder.
It was also revealed that when men divorced and chose a new wife, this was in most cases younger and for divorced women, the new husband was older and a small detail must be mentioned here: the new husband tended to be just a few years older than the women, while the men marrying for the second time tended to choose wives of reproductive age, that's why the age difference in their case was much larger.
"The study shows that there is a "fitness basis" to people's choice of mate age. It also reveals a clash of interest between the two sexes, because women have a smaller window of reproductive opportunity. Once beyond that window, they are out of the game, whereas older men can continue to mate with ever-younger women," said Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool, U.K.