Charles Darwin [1,2] handed us a picture of competition as a constructive process responsible for adaptation to the environment, as well as the evolution of striking sexual displays and weapons. Darwin believed that sexual competition promotes adaptation by helping to weed out poor-quality males from the breeding pool and bringing about assortative pairing between high-quality males and females.

In a seminal paper, Hammerstein and Parker (1987) described how sex roles in mate searching can be frequency dependent: the need for one sex to perform mate searching is diminished when the opposite sex takes on the greater searching effort. Intriguingly, this predicts that females are just as likely to search as males, despite a higher potential reproductive rate by the latter sex. This predic...

M are competitive, sexually indiscriminate, and pushy, whereas females are passive, choosy, and coy. This familiar generalization about the sexual behavior of animals and humans is grossly overstated and potentially misleading, yet has its roots in empirical observation of at least some species. One of the triumphs of modern sociobiology (1, 2) is that evolutionary theory can explain why the se...

This article has two goals, an intellectual history of gender as a concept, and to outline a framework we suggest for moving forward theory and research on gender conceptualized as a structure of social stratification. Our first goal is to trace the conceptual development of the study of sex and gender throughout the twentieth century to now. We do this from a feminist sociological standpoint, ...

With three-quarters of the twentieth century behind us, throughout most of the world, sex, race, ethnicity, and/or income are s t i l l de facto i f not de jure bases of differential access to opportunities and resources. In the realm of education, sex i s characteristically the primary basis of the inequalities that exist in most countries. In the developing nations,educationaldeliverysystems ...

In 1948, Angus J. Bateman reported a stronger relationship between mating and reproductive success in male fruit flies compared with females, and concluded that selection should universally favour 'an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females' to obtain mates. The conventional view of promiscuous, undiscriminating males and coy, choosy females has als...

Scholars have long argued that popular consumer culture is both producer and product of social inequality, but few detailed empirical studies have explored the ways that advertising imagery simultaneously constructs stereotypes of race and gender. This article reports on a content analysis of television commercials (n = 1699) aired on programs with high ratings for specific target audiences fro...

The Confederate state exploited soldiers’ wives’ special social status, Kristen Brill exposes in Weaker Sex: Gender and Nationalism Civil War Virginia. However, also explains that soldiers wives leveraged their status to advance own personal interests, though political rights were not among the interests they pursued. Reviewer J. Matthew Ward writes “artfully how Southern white women could tran...