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Male expendability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis, is the idea that the lives of male humans are of less concern to a population than those of female humans because they are less necessary for population replacement. Anthropologists have used the concept of male expendibility in their research since the 1970s to study such things as polygyny, matrilinearity, and division of labor by gender role.
The concept comes from the idea that, from a reproductivity standpoint, one male may be able to impregnate or otherwise father offspring with many females. In humans, this would mean that a population with many reproducing women and few reproducing men would be able to grow more easily than a population with many reproducing men and few reproducing women.