Ok. I’m not actually sure that it is widely accepted. Your original claim was that 40% of men and 80% of women reproduced, historically, over a long period of time. I understand that you don’t think the exact numbers are important. Where you got the numbers was important to me because I was trying to figure out where your argument was coming from.
I think that the actual source of your numbers are from an interpretation of a study (or studies?) on genetic diversity that compare Y-chromosome diversity to mitochondrial DNA diversity, and conclude that the current population has about a 2 to 1 ratio of female to male ancestors. Full disclosure, I asked Gemini where you got your numbers from, and it pointed me in this direction. It gave me some names, like Dr. Roy Baumeister, as the popularizer of your particular version of this theory. I found these old NYT articles about it: The Missing Men in Your Family Tree - The New York Times and Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions - The New York Times . One of those articles does admit that the 80/40 numbers are somewhat arbitrary, and the important thing is the 2 to 1 ratio.
I do have some criticism of this interpretation of the data. I don’t think that a 2 to 1 ratio of female to male ancestors in our current DNA necessarily means that twice as many women as men have reproduced historically. But I would like to check if this is what you were talking about before getting into that.