Dan wrote
it is often considered an indication of virility for men to have had numerous sexual partners (up to a point), whereas for women this is often frowned upon.
Hence, men would have an incentive to report higher, and women lower, numbers, than actual fact.
EXACTLY. SURELY THIS IS THE RIGHT EXPLANATION. THAT IS WHY I CHOSE THE "SEX, LIES. .." TITLE, (which I cribbed from Lewontin's "Sex, Lies and Social Science")
Dan writes I don't get why replacing "sexual partners" with "spouses" makes any inconsistency clearer. It seems easy to believe that unmarried sexual behavior tends to be different from married.
If some one asserted that there were twice as many married men as married women in America most people (I hope) would say "Wait a minute." The spouse counting model is almost as obvious. Actually I'm told women more often then not outlive their husbands so in fact the survey should probably show the average (or median) woman has more spouses then the median man but surely not twice as many. It doesn't matter whether the coupling is marriage, copulation, or exchanging e-mails. If you could poll the whole world and get accurate response the only way getting a different number of pairings for the men and the women is of one member of a pair reports and the other doesn't. My main point is that it is not responsible for a highly official agency to publish statistics that they know cannot be correct. In the report's "highlights", also quoted in the NY Times, they make the statement about the median number of partners for men, 6 to 8, and women, 3.8 with no caveats. How many people will go to page 12 to find out that this is wrong?
--Dan _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun