14 DAY TRIAL // Women tend to focus more on their careers and workplace when men are not available, or in scarce supply. The conclusion belongs to a study that looked at men-to-women ratios throughout the general population, and derived long-term trends based on these data.
Whenever the number of females far exceeds that of males, the latter feel no need to compete for mates anymore. In fact, this burden may shift to women, and this may account for why many of them opt to pursue developments in their careers instead, rather than start a family.
On average, females who select this path tend to delay having children by at least several years. What is interesting in this behavior is that many women do not even realize it. They do not tend to take into account the ease or difficulty of finding a husband or stable partner.
What scientists are suggesting is that whether or not they can get a husband easily is one of the most important factors affecting any woman's decisions about her career, even if she does not know it, or does not want to admit it.
“When a woman’s dating prospects look bleak, as is the case when there are few available men, she is much more likely to delay starting a family and instead seek a career,” explains University of Texas in San Antonio (UTSA) College of Business assistant professor of marketing, Kristina Durante, PhD.
For this research, experts looked at all US states, and analyzed the correlation between the ratio of single men to single women and the number of women in high-paying positions. They found that more females tended to appear in such jobs when bachelors were in short supplies.
Another effect of this scarcity was that women had children later on in life than normal, but also that they had fewer kids than the average, PsychCentral reports.
“A scarcity of men leads women to invest in their careers because they realize it will be difficult to settle down and start a family. In fact, the strongest effects were found for women who are least likely to secure a mate,” Vlad Griskevicius, PhD, explains.
The expert, a coauthor on the new study, holds an appointment as an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.
“Women who judged themselves to be less desirable to men – those women who are not like Angelina Jolie – were most likely to take the career path when men became scarce,” Durante concludes.