Evolutionary explanations explain gender roles as forming due to different selective pressures of males and females that provide an adaptive advantage to aid survival and reproduction. This explanation see males as hunters and females as domestic gathers.
Short-term mating strategies suggest males will compete for the most fertile mates therefore develop their physical strength and aggression in order to do this. They look for youth and physical attractiveness among females as a sign of fertility. Women normally look for long term mates due to their high parental investment. When using short-term mating strategies males have low parental investment as they can impregnate several women is a short period of time with little effort. Women have high parental investment as they have to carry the child for 9 months and raise it, therefore they choose mates with large resources and low risk of abandonment.
The 'meat sharing' strategy is used to explain why long-term mating strategies developed, and also the male hunter role and the female nurturer/gatherer role. Females have to spend time gestating and nurturing the child therefore cannot hunt. Therefore stay at home and look after a man's children and home. In return he finds food and shares it over an extended period of time.
Buss found women tended to make mate choices based on status and availability of resources and men based choice on youthfulness and good looks. From this it could be concluded that gender differences and preferences are rooted in evolutionary mate selection. Buss suggested these preferences are due to parental investment which differs for each gender. This study used a large sample, 37 cultures were surveyed, followed by an analysis of over 10,000 questionnaire responses. This helped to increase the reliability of findings. However, within methods of self-report demand characterises may have influenced answers. Answers may have be based on their personal life, and the respondents may have also interpreted the questions in their own cultural terms. Therefore the study may lack internal validity in measuring purely evolutionary gender views due to the many extraneous variables that would have likely influenced questionnaire responses. Therefore this study cannot conclusively provide evidence for gender roles being purely evolutionary.
Clark and Hatfield found males were more likely to respond positive to offers that involved sex, supporting the theory males are more likely to use short-term mating strategies supporting an evolutionary explanation for gendered behaviour. However, this study was conducted using a small sample of university students therefore results can only generalise to this age group, providing low external validity. Therefore cannot be used as conclusive support towards an evolutionary explanation of gender development.
Both Buss and Clark and Hatfields' studies found characteristics of male and female gendered behaviour. These characteristics could be argued to provide support towards evolutionary explanations. However, issues occur such as research relies solely on comparative studies providing correctional data. Therefore raises the question of why we should support an evolutionary approach when assumptions cannot be experimentally tested. Such an approach is reductionist as it ignore the role of environmental, cognitive and psychological influences which other research has found to have an influence on us acquiring gender roles.
This approach may also be argues to be deterministic ignoring the role of free will. However, evolutionary psychologists tend to argue free will is adaptive e.g. people have a strong will to mate but choose who to mate with. This has adaptive advantage as we can choose to mate with those with the best possible genes. Further determinism could be argued as the role of social and cultural factors is ignored. Personality may dictate a large part of who we form relationships with, this is not considered, and suggests gender roles are inevitable. Therefore research into this area is socially sensitive as some may view research as further reinforcing evolutionary male sexual aggression and female subservience role.
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