Stellar mass density (SMD) of quiescent galaxies versus redshift based upon our best-fit SMFs (red points) with our best-fit overplotted (red line and shaded region). Also overplotted is a comparison for quiescent galaxies from Weaver et al. (2023), blue points, Santini et al. (2021), grey points, McLeod et al. (2021), light blue points, and theoretical predictions from UNIVERSEMACHINE (Behroozi et al. 2019), dashed black line. We slightly offset the z = 3.25 points for the McLeod et al. (2021) and Weaver et al. (2023) stellar mass densities in order to aid visibility within this figure. In addition, we plot SMDs from SIMBA, SHARK, ILLUSTRIS-TNG100, GALFORM, EAGLE and MAGNETICUM obtained by integrating their SMFs. We see a steeper increase in the observed SMD from z = 5 to z = 2 corresponding to ρ_* ∝ (1 + z)^{−7.2 ± 0.3}, highlighting the increasing importance of galaxy quenching over this epoch.