Female Hypergamy Is Real

This article has a really interesting graphic showing how men and women pair up based on their occupations. Perhaps unwittingly, the data prove the existence and intractable reality of female hypergamy — the tendency of women to date up, or to want to date up, to men who are higher than themselves in social, economic, or occupational status. (I’d include “personality-based” status, as well. Women LOVE LOVE LOVE clever, funny, charismatic men.)

When it comes to falling in love, it’s not just fate that brings people together—sometimes it’s their jobs. We scanned data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey—which covers 3.5 million households—to find out how people are pairing up. Some of the matches seemed practical (the most common marriage is between grade-school teachers), and others had us questioning Cupid’s aim (why do female dancers have a thing for male welders?). High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.

A lot of traditionally-minded alt-righters with arthritic White Knight reflexes are just gonna have to come to terms with the fact of female hypergamy, and how this ancient biomechanical rhythm shapes the sexual market even to this day, when abortion, the Pill, and anonymous urban living are de rigueur adjuncts of courtship.

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Some readers would demur that hypergamy isn’t sex-specific, pointing out that men also strive to find the best possible lover they can get.

My rebuttal is two-part: One, men don’t date up based on social, economic, or occupational status. Men, if and when they are able to date up, do so based almost entirely on women’s looks. We’ve all seen or experienced how men trade up when they’ve come into a financial or social status windfall — younger, hotter, tighter women, as the GBFM would put it. So male hypergamy — what is more precisely termed “physiogamy” — is different in kind from female hypergamy.

Second, male physiogamy is also different in degree from female hypergamy. Women are biologically compelled to aim for a man higher in SMV from themselves, and this compulsion is strong enough that many women will accept long bouts of solitude before settling for a man at their own SMV level (usually at the moment when The Wall first looms on the horizon). When men aim higher, they a. don’t aim quite as high as women aim and b. won’t opt out of the sexual or marital market (like women will often do), if they don’t get everything they want in a lover.

Men invest less psychological energy than do women to the goal of maximizing mate quality, and this is perfectly reasonable from an evo psych view, considering that women have a limited number of eggs and are effectively knocked out of mate competition for nine months plus many years after. Women can’t afford a “mistake” like men can afford it.

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In before some alt-righter broken record claims posts like this one are the equivalent of an MRA whine to reorient the world according to the entitlement complexes of the Eliot Rogers of the world.

The reality is just the opposite: This post is a clarion call to see the world FOR WHAT IT IS, to not live by pretty lies, and to leverage the ugly truths — in this case the ugly truth of female hypergamy — to one’s personal benefit. And, I will argue, individual men demanding the best of women for themselves will redound to the benefit of the whole of society. (Likewise, women demanding the best of men.)