Data from: Sex differences in social focus across the lifecycle in humans

Age and gender are two important factors that play crucial roles in the
way organisms allocate their social effort. In this study, we analyse a
large mobile phone dataset to explore the way life history influences
human sociality and the way social networks are structured. Our results
indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age
and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among
them, males more than females. However, the rate of decrease in the number
of contacts with age differs between males and females, such that there is
a reversal in the number of contacts around the late 30s. We suggest that
this pattern can be attributed to the difference in reproductive
investments that are made by the two sexes. We analyse the inequality in
social investment patterns and suggest that the age- and gender-related
differences we find reflect the constraints imposed by reproduction in a
context where time (a form of social capital) is limited.