OKCupid data shows that women rate approximately 80% of men as below average in attractiveness, while men's ratings of women follow a more balanced, normal distribution.
On Tinder, men liked around 62% of female profiles, while women liked fewer than 5% of male profiles a massive gap in selectivity.
Men find women more attractive than women find men
www.stevestewartwilliams.com
A study of over 1.8 million online daters across 24 nations found that men with above-average resources received 255% more interest than men with below-average resources.
Women do tend to prefer higher-status partners, but actual marriage patterns are more complicated than that simple story suggests.
scienceinsights.org
A Swedish study found that in every union type including those where the woman had more education men were still the most likely to be the main earners, suggesting women continue to prefer higher-earning partners even when they themselves are highly credentialed.
It was once a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman would be in want of a prosperous husband. This is not to say that women wanted to “marry for money.” But it is to concede that when women are unable to earn their own livelihood, as they have been unable to do through much of human...
ifstudies.org
Research conducted across 37 cultures and 10,000 people found that women rated "good financial prospect" higher than men did in every single culture, and in 29 samples, "ambition and industriousness" were more important to women when choosing a mate.
en.wikipedia.org
women can compensate for lower attractiveness with personality/warmth, but men face a dual standard they must be both physically attractive and high-status.
Research showed that social status was important for girls' dating desire in both the attractive and less attractive condition meaning even less attractive men were expected to have status while for boys, status only mattered when the potential partner was already attractive.
The present study examined to what extent adolescent dating desire is based on attractiveness and social status of a potential short-term partner. Further, we tested whether self-perceived mate value moderated the relationship between dating desire ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
"Men care about looks equally" The OKCupid/Tinder data shows men are more generous raters overall, but it's women who impose the harsher minimum threshold on men.
"A 2025 PLOS ONE study found no hypergamy in England over 184 years" That study analyzed 33 million marriages in England from 1837–2021 and found women's average family status equaled that of their husbands', challenging the hypergamy narrative at the behavioral (marriage) level.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0316769