“Lovers and public health officials want an answer to the following question: How many opposite-sex partners have you had in your lifetime? The answer, statisticians say, ought to be the same, on average, for any large group of men and women. But most surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom and other nations find that men report two-to-four times as many sexual partners as do women. Are men lying to inflate their sexual reputations? Are women lying to downplay their sexual experience? Psychologist Norman R. Brown believes this ‘macho and maiden’ hypothesis is the wrong explanation. Most men and women don’t intentionally misrepresent their sexual histories, he maintains. Instead, his studies show that male-female differences in the methods used to estimate the number of partners one has had is the major reason for the discrepancy. ‘Women are more likely to rely on enumeration,’ said Brown, a visiting research scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. ‘They tend to say, ‘I just know,’ and if you ask them to explain how they know, they say, ‘Well, there was John, Tom, etc.’ This is a strategy that typically leads to underestimation. ‘Men are twice as likely to use rough approximation to answer the question. And rough approximation is a strategy known to produce over-estimation.’” — Physorg.com (US)

Many studies have sought to explain the statistical paradox that men and women report grossly different numbers of sexual partners. There are a lot of hypotheses about it, the most common being that men lie to make themselves look macho. Professor Brown tried to filter for this by asking people, after they had admitted how many sexual partners they’d had, whether or not they had lied. Five percent of men and four percent of women admitted that they had — which means either that people were reticent to admit lying or that lying isn’t enough to account for the statistical discrepancy. Five percent isn’t much, after all.

Professor Brown accounts for his results by arguing that the discrepancy may be a by-product of the way that different people answer the question. Consider his chart. Except for the number of women claiming a single lifetime sexual partner (SP), the male and female responses remain relatively in sync until about 10 SPs. After that you can clearly see the males exceeding the females in SPs — and you can also see that responses cluster around 15, 20, 25, etc. Plainly people with a lot of SPs were taking guesses. People were not inclined to say, “I’ve had exactly 48 sexual partners.” Instead, they said, “Yeah, I’ve had about 50 partners.”

So the question becomes this: is the discrepancy in male-female responses tied to the fact that people with greater numbers of SPs (ie men) were obviously guessing as to the exact number? Professor Brown says that the two correlate. Indeed the data suggests a connection, though probably a full explanation of the discrepancy includes this as well as half a dozen other factors, such as exaggeration, peer pressure, statistical anomalies, and the like.

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