![]() ![]() Respiratory infections are a source of morbidity and mortality in the Tsimane population. When they compared those rankings against several measures of health for children, they found children of politically influential women fare better than others, those children grow faster and also are less likely to be diagnosed with common illnesses such as respiratory infections, gastrointestinal diseases and anemia. To measure status in a context of minimal material wealth, the researchers asked men and women to rank all the people in their community in terms of who has the greatest political influence, whose voice carries the most weight during community meetings, who is best at leading community projects and who garners the most respect. “This paper proposes that women may be more likely to leverage their status into greater resources in a way that can benefit their existing children.” “Women may just have different motivations for seeking status than men,” Alami continued. The answer, according to the researchers, is no. “But since women can never have as many children as men can, does this mean that status striving is an exclusively male privilege?” “When we think about social status, it’s often linked - for men at least - to more wealth and sexual partners and to higher fertility in places without birth control,” said Sarah Alami, a doctoral student in anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and the paper’s lead author. Their work appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. ![]() Studying the Tsimane, a population indigenous to the Bolivian Amazon, the researchers found that the children of politically influential mothers are less likely to be sick, and more likely to be of healthy weight and height for their age. New research by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara suggests that a woman’s status does pay off, but in the form of better health outcomes for her children. Given these biological limitations, how might women benefit from high status? Do women have the same motivations for status striving as men do? Realistically, over the course of her childbearing years a woman can’t expect to give birth to more than 20 or so children, and that’s assuming she devotes herself entirely to reproduction. Consider Genghis Khan, who, according to some historical estimates, fathered upwards of 1,000 children with his numerous wives and over 500 concubines.Īnd more recently, there’s Winston Blackmore, the leader of the polygamous Latter-Day Saints group in British Columbia, who is said to have 149 children with his 27 “spiritual wives.”īut what about women, for whom fertility is biologically constrained? Pregnancy, after all, is a nine-month endeavor, followed, in traditional societies, by another several years of breastfeeding. Indeed, much evidence shows that high social status grants men a number of benefits, not the least of which is increased access to sexual partners. What drives people seek to high social status? A common evolutionary explanation suggests men do so because, in the past, they were able to leverage their social position into producing more children and propagating their genes.
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