For decades, surveys across countries have reported a familiar pattern: women, on average, say they care more about a partner’s earning potential, while men, on average, emphasize youth and physical attractiveness. The hard part has been proving why.
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Macken Murphy and colleagues, working in Khandis Blake’s lab at the University of Melbourne, built an experiment to see whether people’s “wealth preference” is fixed, or whether it changes when the economic ground shifts under their feet.
The question behind the stereotype
Earlier cross cultural research often looked like a scorecard for two big stories.
One story, common in evolutionary accounts, treats mate preferences as stable strategies shaped over long time scales.
The other story, rooted in social and cultural explanations, expects preferences to follow current roles and opportunities.
Both camps could point to the same headline result: women typically report a stronger desire for partners with money, status, and ambition; men report stronger interest in looks and younger ages.
But most of those studies were observational.
They measured what people said they wanted in their real societies, then tried to connect the dots. That approach runs into a problem: many factors shift together.
Where men earn more, women have practical reasons to value resources. Where gender equality is higher, people may feel freer to prioritize other qualities.
When everything changes at once, it is hard to know what is driving the preference.
Murphy’s team aimed for something cleaner: change economic conditions on purpose, keep the rest as similar as possible, and watch what happens.
If preferences move, that is evidence for flexibility. If they stay put, that supports the idea that preferences are mostly set.
A virtual country called Stamola
To do this, the researchers created a controlled virtual society called Stamola. Think of it as a social simulation with clear rules.
Participants were told how the economy works, what jobs pay, and where they personally stand. Then, instead of guessing how their real world might influence them, they made judgments inside this made up setting.
The study recruited adults ages 18 to 45 from five English speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
After exclusions, 602 participants remained. Each person was randomly placed into one of several economic situations built from two levers.
The first lever was personal income. Participants could be assigned to an income level ranging from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile. In simple terms, some people were made “poor” in Stamola, some “middle,” and some “rich.”
The second lever was gender economic inequality. In some versions of Stamola, men earned more than women. In others, women earned more than men. In a third setup, earnings were equal.
By mixing and matching these conditions, the researchers could separate the effect of your own income from the effect of your gender’s overall position.
Participants then evaluated what they wanted in a partner.
They rated the importance of traits tied to resources, like wealth, ambition, and job status. They also made tradeoffs, ranking wealth against physical attractiveness.
Another set of questions captured “mating up,” meaning the desire to find a partner with higher resources than oneself. Finally, they reported preferred age ranges for partners.
It is not a dating app, and it is not a real economy. Yet it offers something rare: a chance to test cause and effect in mate preferences without waiting for whole societies to change.
What shifted, what stayed, and what it means
The strongest pattern was straightforward.
When participants had lower personal incomes in Stamola, they placed more importance on a partner’s wealth and related traits. When they were assigned higher incomes, the pull of money weakened.
In other words, resource preferences tracked resource need. That finding alone pushes back on the idea that wealth seeking is a rigid “women’s preference.”
In this experiment, anyone made financially vulnerable leaned harder on financial security.
The gender inequality lever sharpened the story.
When people belonged to the gender that earned less in Stamola, their preference for a wealthier partner rose. When women were placed in a society where women earned more than men, the typical gender gap in wealth preference almost vanished.
This is the key journalistic takeaway: the preference changes with power.
When women have more economic leverage, wanting a rich partner becomes less central, not because values magically change, but because the practical calculus changes.
Murphy and colleagues also found that participants seemed aware of this adjustment.
People in lower income positions were more likely to prioritize money; people in higher income positions were more likely to emphasize non financial qualities such as love, connection, or personality.
That conscious tradeoff fits with a behavioral ecology view, which treats preferences as strategic responses to local conditions.
The study also tracked “mating up.”
When women earned more in Stamola, men and women showed a more equal desire to partner with someone above their own level. That matters because the usual narrative paints hypergamy, or upward partnering, as mainly a female pattern.
The experiment suggests it is better described as a human response to being disadvantaged, not a gendered rule.
Not everything moved.
Preferences around physical attractiveness did not meaningfully change across income or inequality conditions.
Age patterns were also stable: women tended to prefer slightly older men, and men tended to prefer slightly younger women, regardless of the economic setup.
The mixed picture is important.
It suggests some preferences may be more resistant to short term context than others, or at least less sensitive to the specific economic manipulations used here.
Outside Stamola, cross cultural research has repeatedly found that gender gaps in resource preferences are smaller in more equal societies.
Murphy’s PNAS experiment strengthens that claim by showing the shift under controlled conditions. Murphy also notes studies of Haredi Jewish communities, where women are often the main earners; reports from that context suggest men place greater weight on a partner’s finances.
The authors are careful about limitations.
A virtual society is not the same as the stakes and emotions of real relationships.
Stated preferences are also not identical to actual behavior, especially when people meet partners through friends, school, work, and algorithms.
Still, experimental evidence is valuable because it isolates mechanisms that big surveys cannot.
Taken together, the findings argue for flexibility. Partner preferences, especially for money related traits, adapt to both personal income and the wider economic balance between genders.
The simplest summary is also the most useful: when people have less, they look for more; when women have more economic power, the classic gender split over wealth becomes much smaller overall.
