Women want mates with looks, not cash

NEW YORK — Why can't a woman be more like a man? Henry Higgins famously first posed the question 50 years ago in the Broadway debut of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe's smash musical "My Fair Lady."

Women soon entered bastions traditionally reserved for men, from the firehouse to the clubhouse to the international space station. Barbie became an astronaut.

While it may seem like women are already doing just about everything once exclusive to males, Scottish researchers think they have discovered a new area where women, particularly those who are financially independent, are just beginning to mimic men: choosing looks over lucre when shopping for a mate.

"We know that we are becoming more equal in the workplace and the economy. We now know that this ability of women to provide for themselves is causing them to change their mate preferences. Our preferences are becoming more like male preferences," said Fhionna Moore, who led the study at the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The study, conducted online, examined the responses of 1,851 heterosexual women, 18 to 35, who were single, in relationships or married. Most of the participants were from the United Kingdom, elsewhere in Europe and the United States.

Women who had low levels of control over their cash rated the financial status of a man over his looks. Those with a decent source of income rated physical attractiveness more highly.

The study, "The Effects of Female Control of Resources on Sex-Differentiated Mate Preferences," is in this month's journal of Evolution and Human Behavior.

The title may not be catchy, but the findings and their implications are intriguing. Essentially, the results turn the historical rules of sexual pursuit upside-down.

"Historically, if you go all the way back to the cavemen, just like the comedy routine, the man went out and got the meat and brought it back to the woman and the woman prepared it. So, historically, women looked to men to be providers and men, historically, have been criticized as being immediately more struck by the physical appearance of a woman," said Daniel Howard, a consumer psychologist, professor and chairman of the marketing department at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business in Dallas.

While men chose women whose youth and beauty signaled health and fertility, women had to choose partners who would sustain them during labor-intensive child-rearing when women could not provide for themselves or their offspring, Moore said.

The labor-intensive nature of raising children hasn't changed, but the financial ability of many women to care for themselves and their families has and that changes the whole equation. "It's almost as if it were the beginning of a complete role reversal," she said.

For Allison Agliardo, it's less about role reversal and more about confidence. "I've just gotten more mature and confident in myself. Instead of asking what can I give someone else, it's saying, 'Hey, what can he give me?' " said Agliardo, 37, a civil engineer in New York.

And, earning good salaries, she and many of her friends are not looking for men to support them. "Now, all of a sudden, I don't need that security because I've got it; I've got my own bank account," she said.

The other major finding in the study is that the more ambitious a woman is about career, financial independence and decision-making at home and at work, the more likely she will seek a younger mate.

"I think it's probably because if you're very ambitious, you're expecting to have a career and resource control, so you're not expecting to be dependent on an older, wealthier partner," Moore said.

Beauty and youth are notoriously poor criteria on which to base a marriage, said SMU's Howard. "I have a hard time imagining in the long run that this is going to be a significant lifestyle choice for a woman. Why? Because of the experiences of men: It's mostly pain," he said.

"What you are seeing here, mostly, are some women making the mistakes of men. It doesn't work," he said. "Take it from us."

Moore said that although she was specifically interested in studying the impact of attractiveness and wealth, those hardly were the traits women found most desirable in a mate.

"What always comes out on top with women, and sometimes with men, is kindness and things like dependable character. And that's been shown over most of the studies that have been done," she said. "We're not completely shallow."