Financial Status Equally Important to Both Sexes in Partner Selection

What was said

"We have these men and they go speed dating and some of these women are very ambitious, they're going to be lawyers and doctors. Others are a little bit less ambitious. And what you'd see is that the men tended to like the women a little bit more to the extent that they were ambitious. But then when we flipped it and we looked at what the women were drawn to, not what they said, but what they were drawn to, they also tended to like the ambitious men a little bit. And the magnitude of that preference was identical."

Twenty years of speed dating research across 40 countries shows that when evaluating real people face-to-face, men and women value earning potential and ambition identically in partners, contradicting the widespread belief that women care more about financial status. The gender difference exists only in stated preferences and online contexts, not in actual attraction to real people.