Mother's social status is associated with child health in a horticulturalist population

Abstract

High social status is often associated with greater mating opportunities and fertility for men, but do women also obtain fitness benefits of high status? Greater resource access and child survivorship may be principal pathways through which social status increases women's fitness. Here, we examine whether peer-rankings of women's social status (indicated by political influence, project leadership, and respect) positively covaries with child nutritional status and health in a community of Amazonian horticulturalists. We find that maternal political influence is associated with improved child health outcomes in models adjusting for maternal age, parental height and weight, level of schooling, household income, family size, and number of kin in the community. Children of politically influential women have higher weight-for-age ( B = 0.33; 95% CI = 0.12–0.54), height-for-age ( B = 0.32; 95% CI = 0.10–0.54), and weight-for-height ( B = 0.24; 95% CI = 0.04–0.44), and they are less likely to be diagnosed with common illnesses (OR = 0.48; 95% CI = 0.31–0.76). These results are consistent with women leveraging their social status to enhance reproductive success through improvements in child health. We discuss these results in light of parental investment theory and the implications for the evolution of female social status in humans.

Gender Differences in Social Networks Based on Prevailing Kinship Norms in the Mosuo of China

“…Women in matriliny are often implicitly or explicitly assumed to never fully take on roles analogous to those of men in patriliny, particularly as societal leaders. However, a variety of evidence points to the importance of women's leadership and status in securing evolutionarily relevant benefits, such as their own and their children's health and welfare, even if women's influence on average in the range of societies that generate the ethnographic corpus may be less overt than men's within their communities (Alami et al, 2020;Reynolds et al, 2020). Matrilineal women's social relationships as depicted here do not fully mirror men's; still, their relatively large network size suggests that aspects of women's social strategies can resemble men's when women are more central and have more authority and social support (Hrdy, 2000;Mattison et al, 2019;Smuts, 1994).…”

Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary–Developmental Origins

“…Women who try to use resources and status to attract multiple mates are not distinctly favored by natural selection, whereas men are ( Geary, 2010 ; von Rueden et al, 2011 ; Sweet-Cushman, 2016 ; Luoto, 2019 ) 10 . However, politically influential women may be able to bear healthier offspring ( Alami et al, 2020 ), possibly because of higher resource availability which supports somatic and immunological development (cf. Krams et al, 2019 ; Rubika et al, 2020 ).…”

Do wealth and inequality associate with health in a small-scale subsistence society?

“…In a sample of four communities, politically influential men had lower cortisol and a lower incidence of respiratory infection, though there were also many null results, and higher income was associated with higher cortisol ( von Rueden et al, 2014 ). In one village, women’s political influence was associated with improved growth and health outcomes for their children ( Alami et al, 2020 ). Across 13 Tsimane villages, relative wealth was associated with better self-reported health ( Undurraga et al, 2010 ); however, average self-reported health was lower in wealthier villages.…”

“…Community meetings convene to discuss and resolve important matters, including conflicts within the community. As such, we treat the community as the salient scale of status competition ( Alami et al, 2020 ; von Rueden et al, 2018 ; von Rueden et al, 2008 ; von Rueden et al, 2019 ; von Rueden et al, 2014 ) and calculated relative wealth and inequality at this level.…”