Do Men Value Monogamy Less Than Women?

Everybody knows that men want to sleep around more than women do, right? What everybody “knows” is wrong, according to a new study on gender differences in sexuality:

Pedersen, Miller, Putcha-Bhagavatula, and Yang (2002) questioned that common wisdom and more closely examined the gender gap in desire for sexual partners. They asked participants to indicate their ideal number of partners over different time periods and replicated the original findings concerning gender differences in preferences for sexual partners, such that men preferred more partners than women did. However, a strange caveat emerged: This gender difference disappeared when a more accurate measure of central tendency (i.e., the location of the center of the distribution of participants’ scores, or simply put, the typical response) was considered.

Specifically, the distribution of number of preferred partners was highly skewed to the right, such that higher values (i.e., grossly large numbers of sexual partners desired by men) were more spread out than lower numbers, indicating that the means likely do not represent the majority of men and women in the sample. When examining median values (an alternative measure of central tendency for finding the middle score of a distribution recommended when data are skewed; Wilcox & Charlin, 1986) instead of means to assess desired number of partners over a 30-year period, gender differences evaporated (see Pedersen et al., 2002, for further discussion). The use of medians revealed that the majority of men and women desire a similar number of sexual partners: one .

(Via: The Mary Sue )