SMF for passive galaxies in the five CANDELS fields. The solid black points show the stepwise results; the error bars account for Poissonian and cosmic variance uncertainties. The black curves show the Schechter fits and the coloured shaded areas indicate the regions at 68% confidence level considering the joint probability distribution function of the Schechter parameters. The open blue symbols and lines show the SMF for passive galaxies taken from the literature, scaled to a Salpeter IMF, in the same (or very similar) redshift bins (Ichikawa & Matsuoka 2017 as squares, Davidzon et al. 2017 as a dashed line, and McLeod et al. 2021 as a dot dashed line), and at slightly different redshifts (Muzzin et al. 2013 as triangles and Girelli et al. 2019 as 6-point stars).