How do men battle it out for women, and how do women battle it out for men?
Should we expect boys and girls to behave the same, to like the same things, and to have exactly the same aspirations? A key, innate difference between the sexes is that males, by definition, produce a large number of small and motile gametes, while females produce a relatively small number of large gametes. To cut a long story short, males therefore experience much greater variation in reproductive success than do females. In turn, competition between males for females is very different to competition between females for males, and child rearing strategies are very different too.
Dr Joyce Benenson and I discussed some of the explanations for behavioural differences between boys and girls, men and women, due to the fundamentally different evolved strategies that the two sexes have towards childcare, and due to the very different nature of their intra-sexual competition (males against males, and females against females).
