A growing body of research suggests that what people seek in a long-term partner is far more flexible than once believed, especially when it comes to money. A new study indicates that women’s traditional preference for wealthier partners weakens as their own economic power rises.
The findings come from an experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors argue that romantic preferences adapt to personal income and gender economic inequality, rather than being rigid products of evolution or culture alone.
Long-Running Debate On Mate Choice
For decades, scientists have debated why women, on average, report valuing a partner’s resources more, while men tend to prioritize youth and physical attractiveness. Evolutionary theories link this to ancestral survival pressures faced by women during pregnancy and child-rearing.
Competing social and cultural explanations suggest these differences emerged from gendered divisions of labor, where men were cast as primary providers and women as homemakers. In that view, people adjust their preferences to fit the roles societies expect them to play.
Previous research largely relied on cross-country comparisons, correlating national wealth or gender equality with partner preferences. However, these observational studies could not cleanly separate cause from effect, since many cultural, legal and economic factors overlap.
A Virtual Economy Experiment
To address this gap, researchers created a controlled virtual world named Stamola. They recruited 807 English-speaking adults aged 18 to 45 from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ending with 602 valid participants.
Each person was randomly assigned to one of 45 economic scenarios. Their imagined personal income percentile varied across five levels, from the 10th to the 90th percentile relative to others of their own sex in that society.
The researchers also manipulated gender economic inequality. In some scenarios, men earned twice as much as women on average. In others, women earned twice as much as men, or both sexes earned similar average incomes, allowing the team to test the impact of gendered pay gaps directly.
How Money Shaped Partner Preferences
Participants then evaluated 35 traits in a hypothetical long-term partner, rating each from 0 to 10. They considered qualities related to financial resources, such as ambition, job quality and economic security, alongside traits like looks and personality.
They also ranked traits against one another, forcing trade-offs between financial security, physical attractiveness and other qualities. In addition, they stated their preferred age range for a partner and how important it was that a partner be wealthier than they were, a behavior known as mating up.
The results showed a clear pattern: when people imagined themselves as poorer, they placed greater importance on a partner’s financial resources. Participants in lower-income positions rated traits like having a good job as more desirable and were more eager to mate up.
Gender Gaps Narrow When Women Earn More
The overall economic status of each sex also influenced preferences. When participants were placed in scenarios where their own sex faced economic disadvantage, they showed a stronger desire for a financially secure partner, regardless of gender.
Crucially, when women in the virtual society earned more than men on average, the usual sex difference in valuing a partner’s wealth sharply diminished. Men and women became similarly keen on mating up financially under those conditions.
Many participants reported being consciously strategic. When assigned to poorer roles, they prioritized financial security. When made richer, they focused more on love, personality or shared values, underscoring how deliberately people can recalibrate romantic goals.
What Stayed The Same
Not all preferences shifted with economic conditions. The study found that ratings of physical attractiveness remained stable across scenarios. Changes in income and gender pay gaps did not alter how much participants valued looks in a partner.
Age preferences were also strikingly consistent. Women tended to prefer slightly older partners, and men slightly younger ones, regardless of who held economic power in the virtual society. This stability contrasted with some real-world data linking smaller age gaps to higher female earnings.
The authors caution that while economic conditions strongly affected preferences for resources, they did not imply a complete reversal of male and female mate choice patterns. Instead, the findings point to partial but meaningful flexibility.
From Virtual Worlds To Real Life
The experiment’s design raises natural questions about how well stated preferences in a simulated world predict actual dating and marriage decisions. The researchers acknowledge this limitation and urge caution in drawing direct behavioral conclusions.
Even so, the results align with cross-cultural studies showing that in countries with higher gender equality, men and women’s preferences for wealthy partners become more similar. This convergence suggests the experimental effects reflect real-world dynamics.
Real-life examples add further support. Research on conservative Haredi Jewish communities, where women often serve as main earners, has found that men report caring more about a partner’s financial prospects than women do, reversing typical patterns seen elsewhere.
Implications For Dating And Society
The study challenges the idea that women have a fixed, inflexible drive to seek richer partners, a notion often used to predict a shortage of suitable mates for high-earning women. Instead, it suggests that as women gain financial power, their priorities adjust.
This flexibility could ease some concerns about relationship prospects in societies where women increasingly outpace men in education and income. It also implies that men’s preferences may shift when they face greater financial dependence.
Looking ahead, the research team plans to examine how these shifting preferences influence actual partner choices, relationship satisfaction and family formation. Understanding these dynamics will be important as economic and gender roles continue to evolve worldwide.
The study, titled “Partner preferences for resources adapt to income and gender economic inequality,” was conducted by Macken Murphy, Sylvia K. Harmon-Jones, Auguste G. Harrington, Robert C. Brooks and Khandis R. Blake.
