The claim that 80% of women and only 40% of men have reproduced throughout human history is supported by genetic research and widely cited in discussions about human evolution and gender differences.
Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist, popularized this idea based on DNA studies showing that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. This implies that, over human history, roughly 80% of women had descendants who survived to the present, while only about 40% of men did.
This disparity is attributed to historical factors such as:
Polygamy, where a few dominant males fathered many children while many others did not reproduce.
High male mortality due to warfare, risk-taking behavior, and competition.
Female reproductive certainty, as every child has a mother, but paternity is less certain.
While the exact figures may vary, the core concept—that most men throughout history did not pass on their genes, while most women did—is consistent across multiple sources, including studies by Jason Wilder and colleagues (2004), and discussions in academic and public forums.
Note: The 98% figure for women is not supported by the provided sources. The commonly cited estimate is 80%, not 98%. Current data from the U.S. CDC shows about 84% of women aged 40–49 have given birth, which is close to the historical estimate but still not 98%.
This is not my area of scientific expertise. I cannot say if this study by Wilder et al is correct or not, but I can read the study and compare their conclusions to Baumeister's.
Wilder et al conclude that women outnumber men in human ancestry, but they do not conclude that the ratio is two to one. They make a different conclusion about a two to one ratio, which Baumeister incorrectly restates.
The study is based on a survey of the DNA of "25 Khoisan, 24 Mongolians, and 24 Papua New Guineans." The authors take DNA from a 2 specific places (loci) on the DNA of these people. One place is in Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), which is inherited from the mother. The other place is on the Y chromosome, inherited from the father. They compare Y chromosomes to other Y chromosomes, to find out when the Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA) was along the father's line. They do the same for mDNA for the mother's line.
From the introduction to the paper:
One of the most intriguing observations regarding the evolutionary histories of human mtDNA and Y chromosomes is that they are estimated to have very different times to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA).
A short time to male TMRCA compared to female TMRCA is consistent with the claim. Wilder et al reviews many other scientists who also observe this.
Although the reasons for this reduction in variation remain unclear, these findings suggest that mtDNA and the NRY may be influenced differently by natural selection or sex-specific demographic processes.
Other scientists have suggested an explanation of Baumeister's claim due to natural selective forces. The paper refers to the specific type of natural selective forces as "recent positive directional selection."
We see no evidence that recent positive directional selection acting on the NRY is the cause of this disparity in TMRCAs, and we instead hypothesize that there is a widespread skew in the effective breeding ratio toward an excess of females over males among human populations.
Their conclusion uses a lot of technical language. The most plain English sentence I can find was,
Instead, we favor a hypothesis whereby sex-specific demographic processes act to reduce the male breeding population size.
In summary, Wilder et al. conclude that women outnumber men in human ancestry.
Baumeister makes claims that the authors do not make. He said:
They concluded that among the ancestors of today’s human population, women outnumbered men about two to one.
Wilder et al discussed a "twofold greater TMRCA." They also discussed how "male generation time" may be greater than female generation time, as an alternate partial explanation for this. "Twofold greater TMRCA" is not the same as "women outnumbered men about two to one." In some of these paragraphs it seems like Baumeister is just making up numbers. I don't understand the mathematics of TMRCA and effective populations well enough to give you better numbers.
Answer from BobTheAverage on Stack Exchange(speaking from a kind of Selfish Gene perspective).
(In fact at one point it was typical for only 1 in 17 men to reproduce and get ALL 17 women. https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success)
Its rational for women to follow a crowd more, as she needs to make sure she is not one of those 20% that don't reproduce. Her odds of having 2-5 kids just depend on her not messing up too much. She better not stick out, she better conform. Don't make enemies, be agreeable and sociable and likeable. But being part of that 20% is hardwired as a huge fear.
Whereas a man, on average, is not actually going to reproduce at all, statistically. So he better take risks and find some kind of niche skill or talent that will bring in lots of resources for his tribe. Or he must go around secretly sleeping with other mens' women. Or he better be bigger and stronger and more violent than other men, so that the other men do not dare take his woman/women for fear of death. Or he must be crafty and intelligent enough to hunt a tough animal that the other men could not.
And if you are at that time 8000 years ago when 1 in 17 men would get ALL 17 women, and 16 men did not reproduce: you better be the most violent, psychopathic, cunning, intelligent, risk taking, brutal son of bitch to be the guy to cut 16 genetic lines single handedly. Or maybe a group of 10 of you take on 160 other men and take all their women.
Anyway, when you see all the people who got rich of Bitcoin, or lost/won the dotcom boom, or won whatever other games follow a power-law distribution... thats why the gender ratio is the way it is. (In fact its because the minimum commitment to creating a baby is 5 years for a woman and 5 minutes for a man - the best strategies for spreading genes for men are get resourceful and deadly enough to claim all women).
Low status and/or high testosterone men see opportunity in high risk strategies. Historically that means violent uprisings. Today, some will become nazis or communists. Or some high testosterone men have lots of one night stands around clubs and bars. One thing capitalism does well is getting the kinds of people who used to "take a huge risk to win it all" to - instead of starting a violent uprising - do a crazy high risk tech startup that either gets nothing or is worth billions. It is a net positive for society rather than a net negative.
When you look at how marketing differs between genders it follows this. Ads for men are about get-rich-quick schemes, fast cars, status objects.... how to become that top 40%, that 1 in 16. Adverts for women fear based; they tap into fear of becoming the bottom 20%, and what you must do to avoid it, how you must conform to your peers and get this product because you're-not-one-of-us if you don't.
Of course some men are quite feminine and some women are quite masculine. We are talking about means and medians but the Guassians overlap http://www.bzarg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/gauss_joint.png
For most of human history it seemed like only 33% of men reproduced: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770/Genetic-Evidence-for-Unequal-Effective-Population
In the most selective environments there was a 1 to 17 ration of reproductive success in men: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success.
But what is the best guess for male reproductive success (MRS) overall and during bottlenecks in human history? Were there substantial differences in the rates of MRS across Europe, Asia and Africa?
What traits were common among the men who successfully passed on their genes? Low genetic disease load? Physical prowess? Social competence? Assertiveness? Being part of the in-group? Good instincts (or impressionistic thinking)?
There are many sources on the internet claiming that only 40% of men reproduced throughout history, vs 80% of the women. Do these statistics hold any truth?
https://archive.nytimes.com/tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37926/of-all-humans-ever-born-did-most-men-not-become-fathers