If Women Aren't Attracted to Money, Explain This Study
A reader showed me an article with a study in it. Here's what I had to say...
A reader recently pointed me to this article, saying:
A 5'6" man needs to earn $175K more than a 6' man to be equally attractive. Meanwhile, income makes almost no difference to male mate preferences. Further, Black men need to earn $175k more than White men, and Asian men a whopping $247K more. Woe to short Asian men in the dating market. Racial dating preferences is (sic) the most prevalent form of racism people face. The study quantifies the common complaint of Asian men that nobody finds them attractive.
The article says that short men and racial minorities have a more difficult time finding partners because they have to make more money than tall, white men. It’s pretty bad.
The comment came from my article on women wanting sex with attractive men, not the sex-for-money exchange lie we’ve been sold since time immemorial.
I investigated.
First, I dug out the actual study itself.
Frankly, almost all science reporting is absolute junk. Writers focus on catchy headlines and inflammatory content to garner clicks, views, and reads. That’s not my mission.
My goals are intellectual honesty and scientific literacy. Not to mention, perhaps through understanding, we can build a better, healthier sexual world for everyone.
I replied:
Hey Michael, thanks for reading and chiming into the conversation. First, I’ll say that correlation doesn’t equal causation. Where do I begin? I guess I’ll just start from the top.
From the study:
“This paper uses a novel data set obtained from an online dating service to draw inferences on mate preferences and to investigate the role played by these preferences in determining match outcomes and sorting patterns.”
Right in the abstract, we already have a few hardcore selection biases present. A selection bias happens when we use a very specific group of people that aren’t representative of many or even most people. This is the case here.
It’s when the selection process for the study leads to different results than we’d expect from a random selection from the general population.
Like if we polled only Neo-Nazis about racism, the results wouldn’t reflect the views of the average person.
This factors in women from a single specific dating service. The authors say that upfront in their abstract. While the study may represent the people who use this service, which can be highly niche, it’s not something to draw major conclusions from.
"Therefore, the match outcomes in this online dating market appear to be approximately efficient in the Gale-Shapely sense.”
The authors were economists using this specific site because it resembled a market.
Next, we have another selection bias:
“Using the Gale-Shapely algorithm, we also find that we can predict sorting patterns in actual marriages if we exclude the unobservable utility component in our preference specifications when simulating match outcomes.”
I added the emphasis, and I did so for good reason.
Because most women who are dating (only 31% of both men and women are single, according to Pew Research) are under 30. And, considering that women are postponing marriage and children until well into their 30s these days, this dating service clearly caters to a specific type of person that isn’t even the majority of women out there looking for partners.
It’s also a heavy selection bias that the authors only looked into marriages.
A lot of people don’t want to get married. A lot of people aren’t ready to get married right now.
My data actually coincided with this slightly. Women prioritize status when picking a long-term partner, while men prioritize creativity more when picking a long-term partner (my piece explains this here).
But when considering a short-term partner, men and women want the same thing—a physically attractive partner.
The sexes differ on other traits they prefer more from a long-term partner, and both sexes were willing to trade in about half of their desire for physical attraction when it came to picking a long-term partner.
When picking a short-term partner, men and women both prioritized physical attractiveness (to them, whatever that may look like) above all.
And they were willing to trade half of that physical attractiveness for a wider variety of traits when considering what they wanted from a long-term partner.
Next, it’s extremely erroneous to conflate marriage with attraction.
The two are nowhere near the same thing, and if I had to take a stab at it, I’d say that, sadly, most marriages desperately lack attraction. We also shouldn’t conflate marriage with relationships. Those aren’t the same things, either.
I’m going to paste that quote one more time to highlight something else:
“Using the Gale-Shapely algorithm, we also find that we can predict sorting patterns in actual marriages if we exclude the unobservable utility component in our preference specification when simulating match outcomes. One possible explanation for this finding suggests that search frictions play a role in the formation of marriages.”
In other words, their computer models (algorithms) only worked if they tossed out a ton of data because there were traits that people were looking for in a partner that they couldn’t observe.
The authors had to exclude unseen variables in order for the math models to predict outcomes accurately. The rationale for this isn’t that height/race = dating deficits that need to be made up with cold, hard cash. Instead, they’re saying that the difficulty in finding someone we really like is great (search friction) because searches are time-consuming and don’t accurately give us the things that matter.
When you’re unemployed, it can take hours to go to places and fill out applications or turn in resumes. It can be hard to match the unemployed with employers who are looking for those specific skills. This is search friction in action.
The same goes for matching people with others they’d like to date.
I went on to say:
“Trust me, man, there are plenty of short, broke dudes strung out on Oxycontin without a dime in their pocket who are majorly successful with women.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that for every super hot, desirable woman dating a wealthy older man for his cash, I can find you ten such poor (and short) men with a string of women chasing them around.”
Truth is, I’d bet it’s more like 100 for every 1, or even 1,000 to every 1.
Funny how the truth seems to smack people in the face the moment you start looking at the obvious. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all seen plenty of women with poor men (even short ones, even racial minorities). But the old guy buying young affection trope is so well-worn that it sticks out like a sore thumb to our eyes.
The study continues:
“For example, while physical attractiveness is important to both genders, women have a stronger preference for the income of their partners than men.”
This…kind of tracks with what I’ve been saying, but only if you account for people looking for long-term partners and you toss out all the responses from women looking for short-term relationships or something in between. Again, this is what a very specific demographic of married women might want. But it doesn’t represent all or even most women.
Lastly, and this is important…
Even the study authors say this themselves…
Online dating is more representative of a marketplace than it is natural attraction. When we engage with others online, we engage with an avatar—not a flesh and blood person. It’s a lot harder to gain chemistry with someone online than it is in person (though it’s definitely possible).
You just can’t feel them out the same.
Study authors:
“Online dating provides us with a market environment where the participants’ choice sets and actual choices are observable to the researcher."
This is like the difference between a study conducted in a Petri dish and one conducted on live humans. It’s the in-vitro to the in-vivo.
Meanwhile, there’s a plethora of evidence suggesting that women are attracted to chemistry (physical attraction) and, importantly, how their partners make them feel inside.
See this audio episode here on The Science of Sex for more if you haven’t already:
Hopefully, this makes things a bit clearer for the men out there.
I think the big takeaway here is that romance isn’t the field for economists to go poking their noses into—attraction isn’t rational.
Michael’s article has some amazing info! I need to run this by my phrenologist asap…
Good one Joe 🙌