Women who earn more money and hold more economic power become less concerned with the income of their future partner when choosing a romantic partner — though only when their own income actually surpasses men’s, not simply as it rises in general.
Researchers came to this conclusion through a preregistered experiment conducted with hundreds of participants from several countries.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed how factors such as financial status and gender pay gaps influence people’s romantic choices and challenged some common assumptions about gender and partner preferences.
The Experiment
Researchers built a hypothetical online scenario called “Stamola,” in which participants imagined living and working under different economic conditions — an imagined society, not an actual virtual-reality simulation.
The study recruited 807 English-speaking participants aged 18 to 45 from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand; after removing those who failed attention checks, 602 people remained in the final sample, with an average age of 32.
Participants were placed into one of 45 unique variants of Stamola in which the pay ratio between women and men ranged from women earning twice as much as men to men earning twice as much as women, with full equality in between.
Each participant was also assigned a personal income somewhere between the 10th and 90th percentile for their gender — a graded position, not simply the “top” or “bottom” of the hierarchy.
Participants were told their own virtual income, their position in the income distribution, and the average wage of men and women in this virtual world. Afterward, they were asked what kind of partner they would choose in the Stamola world.
Researchers used three metrics to analyze the data: the degree to which participants prioritized a partner who earned more than them; the desirability of traits such as “good job” or “financially stable”; and how money-related traits ranked against qualities like physical attractiveness or personality.
Research Findings
Researchers identified clear trends showing how participants’ income, and the relative pay gap between genders in the experiment, shaped their priorities regarding partners. Those who were personally poorer within the simulation were more likely to say that a partner with good financial prospects was desirable and important to them, regardless of gender.
Women were, on average, more concerned than men with a partner’s financial status — but only in the scenarios that mirrored most real-world economies, where men earned more than women.
When women earned more than men in the virtual world, that difference between men’s and women’s preferences largely disappeared, and both genders became about equally interested in a wealthier partner.
Study author Macken Murphy told PsyPost that he expected some movement in preferences but was surprised that such a brief manipulation of economic conditions could erase a gender difference built up over a lifetime of unequal pay in the real world.
The study also showed that the more money people earned personally, the less they prioritized a partner’s financial status, as participants who could comfortably support themselves did not feel as much need to seek a partner who could also support them financially.
Not every preference shifted, however. Preferences for physical attractiveness stayed essentially stable across every income and inequality condition, and so did the well-known age gap in attraction: women continued to prefer slightly older partners and men slightly younger ones, regardless of who earned more in a given scenario.
Murphy noted that this surprised the research team, since real-world survey data usually show age gaps narrowing as women’s earnings rise.
Significance of Findings
This study speaks to a debate that has run for well over three decades among sociologists and psychologists over why women, more than men, tend to weigh a partner’s income so heavily.
One side has traced the pattern to evolutionary pressures tied to pregnancy and child-rearing, while the other has argued such preferences are largely a product of cultural conditioning that historically left women financially dependent on men.
The study does not settle this argument outright — the authors are explicit that it does not show men and women would completely swap preferences if pay gaps reversed nationally. Instead, it tests a third possibility: that partner preferences for resources adapt strategically, growing stronger for whichever gender, and whichever individual, currently needs financial support more — a framework that borrows from both older theories rather than proving either one wrong.
These findings matter because they show how women’s growing financial independence could reshape the dynamics of romantic relationships. As more women become economically independent, they may rely less on a partner’s income to maintain a comfortable life.
This lines up with broader commentary on financial independence: career and mindset writers have similarly argued that financial independence shifts what people prioritize in a partner, away from earning potential and toward compatibility and emotional connection — an observation this experiment now gives some causal backing to.
Once basic financial security is no longer a pressing concern, people appear to have more freedom to choose partners based on personal fit rather than necessity.
The authors also point to a real-world pattern consistent with their results: in Haredi Jewish communities, where women are often the primary breadwinners, men on average care more about a potential partner’s finances than women do — the reverse of the typical pattern seen elsewhere. Other research supports the broader idea that income shapes relationships in concrete ways.
A separate PNAS study on income inequality has linked unequal economies to heightened status competition among women, and a master’s thesis from Old Dominion University found that which partner in a couple earns more, not just the size of the gap, affects relationship satisfaction.
A smaller qualitative study of financially independent women in Brazil likewise found that earning their own income shaped how these women chose and stayed with partners.
Finally, this research could ease a common worry: that as women become more successful, they will struggle to find partners who meet their traditional preferences.
Because women adjust their preferences as their own financial independence grows, the researchers suggest that concern may be less pressing than commonly assumed — though because Stamola is a hypothetical scenario rather than a real dating pool, the authors caution that stated preferences may not perfectly predict real-world dating behavior, a question they hope to test next.
Sources
Partner preferences for resources adapt to income and gender economic inequality
Women’s desire for wealthy partners drops when they have more economic power