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When opportunity knocks, who answers? Infidelity, gender, race, and occupational sex composition
Author(s) -
Munsch Christin L.,
Yorks Jessica
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
personal relationships
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.81
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1475-6811
pISSN - 1350-4126
DOI - 10.1111/pere.12261
Subject(s) - tokenism , psychology , white (mutation) , social psychology , perspective (graphical) , context (archaeology) , composition (language) , race (biology) , variety (cybernetics) , developmental psychology , gender studies , sociology , paleontology , biochemistry , chemistry , linguistics , philosophy , artificial intelligence , biology , anthropology , computer science , gene
To date, the prevailing explanation for gender differences in infidelity has been evolutionary. Adaptive pressures lead men to seek sexual variety and, consequently, take advantage of opportunities for extramarital sex more than women. However, an often‐overlooked component of the evolutionary perspective is the way in which social context influences behavior. Thus, we extend previous theoretical accounts by examining the ways in which opportunity is facilitated or constrained by experiences of tokenism. The authors find, for White men, who tend to report favorable treatment in female‐dominated work, opportunity is positively associated with infidelity. For non‐White men, who report poor treatment in female‐dominated work, occupational sex composition and infidelity are negatively associated. For White and non‐White women, occupational sex composition is unrelated to infidelity.