Sex differences in music perception are negligible

Abstract

Since Darwin1, researchers have proposed that human musicality evolved in a reproductive context in which males produce music to signal their mate quality to females. Sexually selected traits involve tradeoffs in the costs of high-quality signal production and high-fidelity signal detection2, leading to observable sexual dimorphisms across many species3,4. If musicality is a sexually selected trait in humans, males and females should then differ in their music perception ability, music production ability, or both. The evidence for this possibility is unclear, because previous reports of sex differences in human auditory perception are restricted in scope and inconsistent in direction5–15. Here, we report a test of music processing ability in 360,009 men and 194,291 women from 208 countries. In contrast to other non-musical human traits16–19, and in contrast to music-related traits in non-human animals20–23, we found no consistent advantage for either sex. The sex differences we did observe were negligible (Cohen’sdrange: 0.009-0.111) and Bayesian analyses indicated evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no sex difference in general musical ability (Bayes Factor = 0.6). These results suggest that it is unlikely that music evolved in the context of sexual selection.