Males generally engage in more risky behavior than females: they are more likely to gamble, invest in the stock market more aggressively, binge drink, participate in extreme sports, have unprotected sex, smoke cigarettes, drive recklessly, and use drugs. Between the ages of 15 and 40 years, men are two to three times more likely to die than women, largely due to risk-taking behavior. And a study in the British Medical Journal found that over a ten-year period, men won nearly 90% of the Darwin Awards, which are awarded (usually posthumously) to people who take themselves out of the gene pool in ridiculous ways.

Why are males wired to take more risks than females?

It’s because males compete for female attention, and females find male risk-taking attractive. (If you are a female and think men who take stupid risks are unattractive, bear with me and hear the explanation.)

Females Are Choosier in Mate Selection

To comprehend why males evolved to be risk-takers, we must first understand that in many species, including humans, females generally are more selective than males in choosing their mates. This choosiness is due to several evolutionary factors:

1. Greater biological investment. Females invest more biologically in offspring, from gestation to nurturing after birth. This higher investment means that females have more at stake in ensuring their offspring are healthy and capable of surviving to adulthood.

2. Reproductive Capacity. Compared to males, females can produce a limited number of offspring in their lifetime. This limitation makes each reproductive opportunity more valuable, leading females to be more selective to maximize the success of their progeny.

3. Ensuring Quality. Given the high cost of reproduction and low reproductive capacity, females benefit from being choosy and selecting mates who can provide good genes, resources, and protection, thus increasing the chances of their offspring’s survival. Males are different: Due to their nearly unlimited reproductive capacity, mate selectivity is not nearly as important.

Thus, females look for cues that signal the quality of potential mates, both in terms of genetic fitness and the ability to provide for and protect the woman and her offspring. These cues, which are largely processed subconsciously, include:

• A V-shaped build, which is associated with higher testosterone (dominance) and better health.
• Displays of resources that suggest the ability to better care for the woman and her progeny (this explains why women may prefer older men who have had more time to accumulate resources).
• Taller men, which is related to dominance.

Another cue that signals male mate quality is risk-taking behavior.

Male Sexual Competition and Risk-Taking

Because females are more selective, males must compete more intensely than females for mating opportunities. This drives various behaviors, such as risk-taking, which can signal desirable qualities to potential mates.

Evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel summarizes how risk-taking is an honest signal of male quality in his excellent book The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy:

[R]isk-taking communicates reliable information about how robust and skilled a person is. If you succeed at the risk, then you’re skilled. If you fail but survive, then you’re robust. If you fail and don’t survive, well, that’s indicative, too. For this reason, women can use male risk taking as a sign of quality, suggesting that men are likely to evolve a tendency to take risks when they have the opportunity to attract a woman.

Thus, human male risk-taking is akin to the impractical physical ornaments that high-quality males of other species display to signal fitness. Male peafowl (i.e., peacocks) are prime examples of this “costly signaling” with their large, beautiful plumage. The tails of peacocks waste energy, reduce their mobility, and draw predators. One would think that evolutionary theory would suggest that male peacocks would evolve to have smaller, less colorful tails. But that’s not the case. Instead, the bigger and more impractical tail paradoxically suggests great strength and fitness.  A lesser peacock wouldn’t have survived with a large colorful plume.  This is attractive to peahens who recognize the strength signaled by the costly tail. Similar examples include male elk and deer with impractically large antlers and male fiddler crabs with their one huge claw, which is costly to maintain and impairs movement.

Two other facts support that male risk-taking is largely done to attract females:

• First, “Higher risk-taking is particularly characteristic for the male population between the ages of 15–35 years, the time when intrasexual competition is the strongest.” Source.
• And second, studies show “that males are more likely to engage in risky behaviors in the presence of females, and especially in the presence of attractive females.”

But Do Females Really Find Risk-Taking Attractive?

If you are female, maybe you think that males who take risks are imprudent or even idiots. Fair enough. However, the preferences of single members of a species aren’t necessarily indicative of overall population preferences. That male risk-taking behavior has continued from the origins of our species to the current day means that it is a valuable evolutionary trait that leads to greater reproductive success for risk-taking males. In other words, males wouldn’t act as they do if it didn’t help their reproductive chances.

Here’s how William von Hippel explains this concept in The Social Leap:

Sexual selection is a powerful force in evolution. If there is a trait that members of the opposite sex find distasteful, that trait will tend to disappear in the population (even if it facilitates survival) because owners of that trait will have trouble finding mates. For example, it’s conceivable that being a super-timid guy and hiding at the first sign of danger might have facilitated survival, but most women would have found this an undesirable trait because such a partner probably wouldn’t protect her and her children. As a consequence, there haven’t been too many super-timid guys, or at least not many who were willing to act in a super-timid way when women were around. Similarly, if there is a trait that members of the opposite sex find attractive, even if that trait diminishes our chances of survival, it can become common in the population because owners of that trait will have more mating opportunities.