Male expendability

Male expendability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the idea that the lives of human males are of less concern to a population than those of human females because they are less necessary for population replacement. Anthropologists have used the concept of male expendibility in their research since the 1970s to study such things as division of labor by gender role, polygyny, and matrilinearity. Men's rights advocates have adopted the idea to explain and defend their own views of society. The concept comes from the idea that, from a reproductivity standpoint, one male may be able to impregnate or otherwise father offspring with many females. In humans, this would mean that a population with many reproducing women and few reproducing men would be able to grow more easily than a population with many reproducing men and few reproducing women. According to Carol Mukhopadhyay and Patricia Higgins, the concept of male expendability was first described by fellow anthropologist Ernestine Friedl in 1975, though she gave it no particular name. Friedl noted that most hunter-gatherer and horticultural groups that she had studied for her book, Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View, gave the tasks of hunting and warfare to men, employing women very sparingly or not at all. She hypothesized that this could be because hunting and warfare required the men to be away at home for long, unpredictable periods, which was not compatible with the care of young children in which many women were heavily occupied and could be because fewer men would be needed to replenish the population, given that women in horticultural societies were limited to about one child every three years. The idea of male expendability in humans stems from the assumption that the biological differences in the roles of the sexes in procreation translate into societal differences in the level of bodily risk considered appropriate for men and women.