Data from: The evolution of male and female mating preferences in Drosophila speciation

The relative importance of male and female mating preferences in causing
sexual isolation between species remains a major unresolved question in
speciation. Despite previous work showing that male courtship bias and/or
female copulation bias for conspecifics occur in many taxa, the present
study is one of the first large-scale works to study their relative
divergence. To achieve this, we used data from the literature and present
experiments across 66 Drosophila species pairs. Our results revealed that
male and female mate preferences are both ubiquitous in Drosophila but
evolved largely independently, suggesting different underlying
evolutionary and genetic mechanisms. Moreover, their relative divergence
strongly depended on the geographical relationship of species. Between
allopatric species, male courtship and female copulation preferences
diverged at very similar rates, evolving approximately linearly with time
of divergence. In sharp contrast, between sympatric species pairs, female
preferences diverged much more rapidly than male preferences and were the
only drivers of enhanced sexual isolation in sympatry and Reproductive
Character Displacement (RCD). Not only does this result suggest that
females are primarily responsible for such processes as reinforcement, but
it also implies that evolved female preferences may reduce selection for
further divergence of male courtship preferences in sympatry.