This explanation assumed that males and females are equally costly for parents to produce. However, if one sex were more costly than the other, parents would allot their resources to their offspring differentially. If parents could have two daughters for the same cost as one male because males took twice the energy to rear, parents would preferentially invest in daughters. Females would increase in the population until the sex ratio was 2 females: 1 male, meaning that a male could have twice the offspring a female could. As a result, males will be twice as costly while producing twice as many offspring, so that males and females provide the same proportion of offspring in proportion to the investment the parent allotted, resulting in an ESS. Therefore, parents allot equal investment of effort in both sexes. More generally, the expected sex ratio is the ratio of the allotted investment between the sexes, and is sometimes referred to as Fisherian sex ratios.