Men Are Only Attracted To Older Women If She Makes This Much (Study We Didn’t Need Finds)

New research calculated how much a woman must earn to offset the “penalty” of aging.

Every so often, I tinker with my dating app profile and swap a career picture (signing books or speaking at an event) with a bikini picture.

And then I watch my matches triple.

We all know that shallowness is the inertia that keeps our world spinning. These newfangled algorithms merely shine an ugly black light on a murderous truth – men care about a woman’s appearance far more than her career success.

Yet academics waste time and money, concluding the obvious — women are drawn to men with intelligence, ambition, and resources. Men are drawn to the most beautiful and naked flesh.

It’s grossly unfair. Money can be saved. Beauty must be spent. And you better spend it when you have it.

Intelligence also endures. Intelligence is the hardy weed that survives the frost, while beauty, as the saying goes, is the bloom that falls off the rose.

But there’s no sense in complaining when ageism exists in almost every culture and every century. There’s a reason why older and not younger women were prosecuted as witches — fear.

Aging is the grim reaper’s ugly messenger. Every wrinkle, grey hair, and sagging bit of flesh reminds us we are closer to death. And for some reason, our lizard brains equate an aging woman with the end far more than an aging man.

The less cynical will claim aging is a privilege. Unfortunately, most single women are put out to pasture like crippled racehorses after age 50. And it’s not an All Dogs Go to Heaven sort of pasture.

To me, aging is like playing dodgeball. You are doing fabulous if you are still in the game. Unfortunately, the closer a man gets to death, the more likely he is to tag a woman out.

Research will back me up. While studies have found women prefer men “around their own age up to about 10 years older,” men’s preference for younger women increases as they age. Men in their 20s prefer women 1–2 years younger. Men in their 30s prefer women 2–3 years younger. But men in their 50s and 60s prefer women ten years younger.

Why are older men more prone to age hypergamy? Obviously, beauty isn’t the only arrow in a woman’s quiver. There’s also a sense of humor, creativity, intelligence, wealth, kindness, honesty, and many other traits men claim they value. (Although they don’t choose those women in experimental studies that don’t rely on self-reporting.)

Still, a woman’s bank account has to count for something. While a rich, older man gets his fair share of right swipes, can a woman’s wealth offset her loss of youth? Well, buckle up and hold on to your geriatric meds because one study calculated exactly how much an aging woman should earn to offset the “penalty” for lost youth.

Researcher Corinne Low used a clever method to gather data. She asked male online daters in their 30s to rate hypothetical female dating profiles. Then to encourage brutal honesty, she incentivized them by offering professional dating advice based on their preferences.

Basically, she exchanged sex for honesty. Here are the results.

First, she found men penalize older women independently of attractiveness. Older research found the same — the so-called “cougar phenomenon” does not exist.

Ouch. Oh, but it gets worse.

Low found that for every year a woman ages past 30, she must earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive to male partners.

Obviously, most women can’t snap their fingers and make an extra 7K a year. My GoFundMe campaign for sagging tits didn’t make one lousy ducat…yet. And where is the comparative study on men? I would love to know how much money men need to make annually to offset declining fertility, beer guts, and nose hairs.

More importantly, should women in their 30s and 40s invest in their 401k accounts instead of another beauty product if they want to retain their romantic clout?

Well, not so fast, my fabulously 40+ foxes. The study also found the only men who needed monetary compensation for dating older women were those who wanted children.

Feeeeeeew. My deadened ovaries just saved me from some risky stock investments.

I am being punchy, but to be fair to Low’s work, younger women needed this study. As previously discussed, the wage gap is actually a motherhood penalty. If a woman decides to have children, there is an economic and health cost to that decision that most men don’t incur. Statistically, men who become dads make more after they have children, while women earn less.

You can shoot the messenger, but every woman over thirty knows the raw deal. Every year a woman waits to get married and have children, her value in the marriage market decreases.

But her value decreases mainly in the eyes of men. I see a simple solution to this thorny conundrum of whether to invest in your career or a family. Use a different currency.

Or as the powerful (and childless) queen Elisabeth, I once declared, “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.”

More from Carlyn Beccia:

To read more, please visit my affiliate link. A portion of your Medium subscription supports my work: