Just 11% of women say their ideal match can make less money than them: survey

Women are far less likely to be attracted to someone who earns less than them than men are, a new poll found.Only an average of 11% of women said their “ideal partner” could earn less than them, while an average of 61% of men said their ideal partner could make less, the poll from matchmaking service Keeper found.That means a vast majority of women — 89% — cared about their partners being the breadwinners, while men were much less concerned about it, with just 39% of men saying they were interested in higher earners.The poll drew on 9,630 Keeper users — 6,251 men and 3,401 women, most of whom were heterosexual — between July 1 and Sept.8, whose sign-up forms asked about marriage preferences to help the AI-driven platform better align them with potential matches.Those preferences buck recent social trends — wives earning more than husbands tripled in the last 50 years, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study which found 55% of American households have a male breadwinner and 16% have a female.But Keeper founder Jake Kozloski thinks contemporary culture and historical culture — along with people’s interior inclinations born of those cultures — will inevitably be out of step, leading to the kind of results his study found.“We’re evolved to have certain preferences as men and women on average, and I think one of the preferences that women pretty clearly have — and that’s been replicated cross-culturally and in a lot of academic research — is a preference for higher socioeconomic status,” Kozloski told The Post.“Culture can only override so much biology, right?” he added, pointing to a 2020 study of 45 countries which found women tended to prefer older providers and men tended to prefer younger lookers.However, men and women’s preferences did tend to change as each earned more money in the Keeper study — sometimes drastically.Only 10% of women making less than $50,000 per year said their ideal partner could earn less than the...