Salma Hayek and the Myth of the Gold Digger

Women who “marry up,” even if they’re wealthy in their own right, are always suspect

Salma Hayek and her husband, François-Henri Pinault, just celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary —a pretty long marriage for any couple, but particularly notable in Hollywood terms.

And yet recently, their marriage has again become suspect because Pinault — chief executive officer of Kering and president of Groupe Artémis — is worth about $7 billion and Hayek is only worth some $200 million, and therefore she must have married him for him money.

As if a woman worth $200 million would actually need to marry someone for money.

It came up on a recent episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, when co-host Dax Shepard said about Pinault:

“I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t know who he was, I just heard or maybe read in a headline that you had married a really rich guy. Maybe that’s why she married him.”

Just imagine if Pinault was on the podcast, not Hayek — do you think Shepard would have said, “I just heard or maybe read in a headline that you had married a really rich woman. Maybe that’s why he married her.”

Or, “I just heard or maybe read in a headline that you had married a really beautiful actor. Maybe that’s why he married her.”

Of course not. Women who “marry up,” even if they’re wealthy in their own right, are always suspect — a gold digger for sure. She wants wealth, he wants youth and beauty, although that dynamic only seems to matter to people who have gender-unequal attitudes. Actually, women with higher incomes just want a man with a steady income, period.

It’s the same story if a younger women marries a much older man, a dynamic we see play out over and over, most recently when Dennis Quaid, 66, married fiancee Lauren Savoie, 27, last summer.

The narrative is always that if a woman marries a man who holds more power than she does, either because he’s older or richer or both, then she is only marrying him because she wants something from him; There’s hardly any discussion, or judgment, about what he might want from her — and what he clearly is willing to give.

Hayek and Pinault do not have an age gap — she’s 54 and he’s 58 — but then there’s the pesky matter of their wealth gap, millions versus billions.

There’s a bias against wealthy men, Hayek says:

“Immediately you think because somebody’s rich, [they] might not be a good person, might be somebody materialistic, might be somebody that doesn’t have values, might be somebody that is even stupid or that doesn’t deserve it [or] that in order to have a lot of money, you did it the wrong way, there is all this preconceptions and I heard them, by the way.”

Is there the same kind of discrimination against wealthy women?

Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women, is worth about $4 billion; her longtime partner Stedman Graham is only worth about $10 mil — is he a gold digger? Is she not a good person? Did she get her money the “wrong” way? Do we ever hear talk about Graham staying with her because she’s wealthy?

Of course not.

And Oprah’s just one of a handful of women who make much more than their romantic partner. That’s likely to grow, as women are increasingly more educated than men. Are men who “marry up” the new gold diggers? A recent study suggests, yes.

Once women were able to make their own money and not have to rely on a husband to survive — as we had to for too many years because that’s how the patriarchy set it up and any wealth a woman had automatically became the property of her husband— fewer actually have to look at a man’s financial portfolio to see if he can support her and whatever children they might have together. That said, women (and men) want a partner who shares the same financial values they do.

In truth, many people want to be wealthy, or at least financially stable, and many people want love. At its heart, marriage is a financial arrangement, and you’d be foolish to ignore what money means in your relationship.

Even if you believe Hayek was seeking wealth and Pinault was seeking beauty, consider this — Hayek was 43 when she wed, one of many women who tied the knot past age 40, proving that midlife women most certainly are not invisible.

Hey, I’m working on a book on changing the narrative about middle-aged and older women. Interested? Follow me here, on Medium, and on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, and let’s do this. Want to learn how to create a marriage based on your values and goals? (Of course you do!) Read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore (please do) or order it on Amazon. And we’re now on Audible.

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