Finding it hard to win over your dream girl? Don't lose hope, blokes, for a new study says that women play hard to get to find out how helpful men will be in bringing up a child.Researchers in Britain have carried out the study and found that females employ the technique so that men can prove themselves more worthy than their rivals – but it only works where there are different types of men to choose from."The more coy females are, the more helpful men will be; and the more men around, the more coy women are. This only works if there is a mixture of helpful and unhelpful men. If men are all the same the less effective this strategy will be."In the real world it seems females use coyness to select men by seeing how the male behaves in the different situations. Eventually she will decide 'I am going to have a child with this male' or 'I am going to reject him and find a better one'."Of course there are men who have mastered the ability of conning women into thinking they are helpful," the study's lead author Professor John McNamara was quoted by 'The Daily Telegraph' as saying.In fact, Prof McNamara and colleagues at University of Bristol have based their findings on an extensive analysis of data on mating birds.According to the researchers, the study could lead to a model that might work out the optimal amount of coyness for a woman to use in choosing a male and in many animal species, females will benefit if they can secure their mate's help in raising their young."We predict that a high degree of coyness should be associated with a high encounter rate during mate search, with an intermediate rate of information gain during mate inspection and with an intermediate dependence of reproduction on male help. Strongly biased sex ratios, however, preclude coyness," they said.The findings are published in the latest edition of the 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B' journal.
