Effects of wife’s and husband’s income on wife’s reproduction: an evolutionary perspective on human mating

ABSTRACT

From an evolutionary perspective, for women mate choice may be of crucial importance particularly concerning resources needed for rearing children. In modern societies, however, resources in terms of income are often provided by both women and men. Nonetheless, the effects of a wife’s and husband’s socioeconomic status on the wife’s reproduction have not been investigated on a broader level. We therefore aim to investigate the effects of wife’s and husband’s income on wife’s number of children and her probability of remaining childless using census data from nine countries mainly in the developing world for a total of 782,147 women aged 45–54 years who currently live with a husband and their spouses. Overall, both wife’s and husband’s income are significantly negatively associated with wife’s number of children. Only in Israel do we find a positive association between husband’s income and wife’s offspring number. A wife’s probability of remaining childless, however, increases with increasing own, but decreases with increasing husband’s income. We conclude that in this sample of nearly all developing countries, effects of husband’s socioeconomic status on wife’s reproduction are acting through childlessness.

Acknowledgments

Minnesota Population Center. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International: Version 7.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18128/D020.V7.0.and the following national statistical offices: Brazil Institute of Geography and Statistics, Colombia National Administrative Department of Statistics, Dominican Republic National Statistics Office, Indonesia Statistics Indonesia, Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Mexico National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics, Panama Census and Statistics Directorate, South Africa Statistics South Africa, Venezuela National Institute of Statistics

Author Contributions

MF analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. SH wrote the manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.