In July 2025, Ugandan courts quickly dismissed a petition challenging the legality of polygamy, citing the protection of religious and cultural freedom. For most social scientists and policymakers who have long declared polygamy a “harmful cultural practice,” the decision represented a frustrating but predictable setback in efforts to build healthier, more egalitarian societies.
In the vast majority of cases, polygamy manifests itself with a single husband and several wives; more precisely, it is called polygyny, which comes from the Greek words “poly” (“many”) and “gynē” (“woman or wife”). The opposite situation, with a single wife and several husbands, is known as polyandry (from “anēr”, meaning “man” or “husband”) and is extremely rare throughout the world.
Critics of polygamy present two main arguments. First, they argue that it drives low-status men out of the marriage market, fueling social unrest, crime, and violence against women by frustrated single men. Second, it harms women and children by dividing limited resources among the most dependent.
This logic led noted political scientist Rose McDermott to describe polygamy as evil. Other researchers, such as anthropologist Joseph Henrich, even go so far as to attribute Christianity’s mockery of polygamy as a driving factor in Western prosperity.
However, three new studies, all based on the highest standards of data analysis, argue that these arguments are wrong.
I have dedicated my career to working at the intersection of anthropology and global health, researching how and why family structure varies and what this diversity means for human well-being. Much of this work was done with colleagues in Tanzania, where, as in Uganda, polygamy is relatively common. This new wave of work underscores the value of our research, effectively demonstrating that good intentions and intuition are no substitute for cultural sensitivity and evidence.
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Does polygamy prevent men from getting married?
A new study, published in October 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents the first comprehensive, large-scale analysis of polygamy and men’s marital prospects. The project is a collaboration between demographer Hampton Gaddy and evolutionary anthropologists Rebecca Sear and Laura Fortunato.
The researchers relied on demographic models and an extraordinary amount of census data: more than 84 million records from 30 countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania, plus the entire US census from 1880, when polygamy was practiced in some American communities. They demonstrate that polygamy does not exclude a large number of men from marriage. In fact, in many contexts, men are more likely to marry where polygamy is common than where it is uncommon.
The idea that polygamy leads to lonely singles is intuitive. In a community with equal numbers of men and women, if one man marries two wives, the other must remain single. Extend this to an entire society, and polygamy seems like the perfect recipe for an army of single, resentful men.
Similar arguments have been made about the rise of incel (a combination of “involuntary” and “celibate”) subcultures in monogamous nations, including the United States. In this case, the argument is that high-status men leave low-status men asexual and frustrated, which ultimately leads to violence.
The problem is that the actual demographics are not that simple. Women tend to live longer than men, men frequently marry younger women, and populations in many parts of the world are growing, ensuring the availability of younger spouses for older cohorts. These factors, characteristic of many contemporary African nations, tilt the marriage market toward a surplus of women. Under many realistic conditions, a considerable proportion of men can have several wives without leaving their peers destitute.
In fact, in nearly half of the countries examined, higher rates of polygamy were associated with fewer, not more, single men. Only a few countries showed the expected positive relationship, and even then, inconsistently over time.
The case of historic Mormon communities in North America is equally revealing. Comparing counties with documented Mormon polygamy to others in the 1880 census, researchers found lower rates of unmarried men in polygynous areas. Gaddy and his colleagues argue that this is explained by the tendency of cultural norms that favor polygamy to also be relatively pronatalist, which drives marriage rates upward in all cases.
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Do women and children receive a smaller portion?
What about the argument that polygamy harms women and children by dividing male wealth among more mouths to feed? There are certainly studies that have shown associations between polygamy and poor health. But another line of thinking holds that correlation should not be equated with causation.
Ten years ago, my colleagues and I documented that polygamy is associated with greater food insecurity and poor child health by comparing outcomes in more than 50 villages in Tanzania. However, this pattern was because polygamy was more common in marginalized Maasai communities, who tend to live in drought-prone areas with poor healthcare. Furthermore, when comparing families within communities, polygynous households tended to be wealthier, a key factor that made polygamy attractive to women, and children were not harmed.
Echoing these results, anthropologist Riana Minocher and her colleagues recently published a study using a detailed longitudinal data set from a 20-year prospective study in another region of Tanzania. When analyzing the survival, growth, and education of thousands of children, they found no evidence that monogamous marriage is advantageous.
Together, these results support a theory known as the threshold model of polygamy. Simply put, if women have a choice in their marriage, sharing a husband is unlikely to be economically detrimental, as they will prioritize marrying men with enough wealth to offset any costs. This scenario may not apply to all contexts, but these studies clearly refute claims that polygamy is unequivocally harmful.
Hidden advantages of polygamy
Another recent study, published in August 2025 by economist Sylvain Dessy and his colleagues, goes further, suggesting that polygamy has unrecognized advantages in difficult times.
Using data on crop yields from more than 4,000 farming households in Mali, census data on marriage patterns, and detailed weather records, they found that in villages where polygamy is rare, droughts dramatically reduce harvests. However, in villages where polygamy is common, that impact is softened.
Researchers argue that polygamous marriage, by increasing the number of in-laws, creates stronger social support networks. Additionally, since wives often come from different villages and regions, distant relatives are in a good position to send food, money, or labor when local crops fail. This support helps explain both the resilience of polygamous communities during droughts and the persistence of the marriage practice from one generation to the next.
So is polygamy harmless?
These studies do not mean that polygamy is harmless. In fact, allowing men, but not women, to have multiple spouses is clearly unequal and intertwined with patriarchal ideology that positions women as subordinate or inferior to men. Recent studies, for example, have suggested that polygamous marriages are more prone to intimate partner violence.
In short, there are multiple ways in which polygamy can be harmful.
However, the strongest evidence suggests that polygamy is unlikely to be a root cause of social unrest. Furthermore, within broader patriarchal systems that benefit few women, regardless of their marital status, economic situation and social security, polygamy may not only be a tolerable option, but in some contexts a preferred option with tangible benefits for both genders.
Simplistic stories about the dangers of polygamy may be compelling and insightful, but they risk misleading the public, reinforcing long-held ideas of Western cultural superiority, and disrupting the effectiveness of global health policies by marginalizing more relevant initiatives. Building healthier societies requires paying attention to the evidence and remaining open to the possibility that all family structures can cause harm.
*David W. Lawson is Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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