What Women Want – Desired Traits

“Among humans, the evolution of women’s preference for a permanent mate with resources would have required [some] preconditions. … men would have had to differ from each other in their holdings and their willingness to invest those holdings in a woman and her children – if all men possessed the same resources and showed an equal willingness to commit them, there would be no need for women to develop the preference for them. Constants to not count in mating decisions.”

It is variation among potential mates that guides mating decisions.

Economic Capacity

“Men vary tremendously in the quantity of resources they command – from the poverty of the street bum to the riches of Trumps and Rockefellers. Men also differ widely in how willing they are to invest their time and resources in long-term mateships. Some men are cads, preferring to mate with many women while investing little in each. Other men are dads, channeling all of their resources to one woman and her children.

Women over human evolutionary history could often garner far more resources for their children through a single spouse than through several temporal sex partners. Men provide their wives and children with resources to an extent that is unprecedented among primates.”

“So the stage was set for women to evolve a preference for men with resources. But women needed cues to signal a man’s possession of those resources. These cues may be indirect, such as personality characteristics that signaled upward mobility. They might be physical, such as a man’s athletic ability of health. They might include reputational information, such as the esteem in which a man was held by his peers. Economic resources, however, provide the most direct cue.”

Social Status

“Traditional hunter-gather societies, which are our closest guide to what ancestral conditions were probably like, suggest that ancestral men had clearly defined status hierarchies, with resources flowing freely to those at the top and trickling slowly to those at the bottom.”

This is a noteworthy statement because it emphasizes the hierarchical flow of resources, favoring those at the top.

“Henry Kissinger once remarked that power is the most potent aphrodisiac. Women desire men who command a high position in society because social status is a universal cue to control of resources.”

“Women in the United States do not hesitate to express a preference for mates who have high social status or a high-status profession, qualities that are viewed as only slightly less important than good financial prospects.”

“Women judge the likelihood of success in a profession and the possession of a promising career to be highly desirable in a spouse. Significantly, these cues to future status are seen by women as more desirable in spouses than in casual partners.

American women also place great value on education and professional degrees in mates – characteristics that are strongly linked with social status. The same study found that women rate lack of education as highly undesirable in a potential husband. The cliche that women prefer to marry doctors, lawyers, professors, and other professionals seems to correspond with reality. Women shun men who are easily dominated by other men or who fail to command the respect of the group.”

“Because hierarchies are universal features among human groups and resources tend to accumulate to those who rise in the hierarchy, women solve the adaptive problem of acquiring resources in part by preferring men who are high in social status. Social status gives a woman a strong indicator of the ability of a man to invest in her and her children. … Women worldwide prefer to marry up. Those women in our evolutionary past who failed to marry up tended to be less able to provide for themselves and their children.”

The Status Game by Will Storr comes to mind here. Taken together, these passages frame mate preferences as a systematic response to social hierarchy rather than individual taste. From this perspective, status operates as a reliable proxy for present and future resource control, making it especially salient in long-term mating contexts. The emphasis on education, professional success, and dominance within hierarchies reinforces the argument that these preferences are not culturally arbitrary but reflect recurrent adaptive pressures.

Age

“To understand why women value older mates, we must turn to the things that change with age. One of the most consistent changes is access to resources.”

“In a study of women’s mate preferences, one woman noted that ‘older men [are] better looking because you [can] talk to them about serious concerns; younger men [are] silly and not very serious about life.”

“A long history of evolution by selection fashioned the way in which women look at men as success objects.”

“young men are scrutinized carefully by both women and older men to evaluate which ones are ‘comers,’ destined to acquire status and resources, and which are likely to remain in the slow lane”

“women who value the personality characteristics likely to lead to status and sustained resource acquisition are far better off than women who ignore these vital characterological cues.”

This leads straight to ambition and industriousness.

Ambition and Industriousness

“sheer hard work proved to be one of the best predictors of past and anticipated income and promotions. Those who said that they worked hard, and whose spouses agreed that they worked hard, achieved higher levels of education, higher annual salaries, and anticipated greater salaries and promotions than those who failed to work hard. Industrious and ambitious men secure higher occupational status than lazy, unmotivated men do.”

“Women in the study of temporary and permanent mating regard men who lack ambition as extremely undesirable … Women are likely to discontinue a long-term relationship with a man if he loses his job, lacks career goals, or shows a lazy streak.”

“women evolved a preference for men who show signs of the ability to acquire resources and a disdain for men who lack ambition.”

Women consistently evaluate ambition and work ethic as key indicators of a man’s capacity to acquire resources, particularly in long-term mating contexts. Consequently, men who lack ambition are perceived as highly undesirable and face a higher risk of relationship dissolution.

Dependability and Stability

“Among the eighteen characteristics rated in the worldwide study on choosing a mate, the second and third most highly valued characteristics, after love, are a dependable character and emotional stability or maturity.”

“Emotionally unstable men – as defined by themselves, their spouses, and their interviewers – are especially costly to women.”

Taken together, these findings suggest that women tend to avoid highly neurotic men.

Compatibility

“Successful long-term mating requires a sustained cooperative alliance with another person for mutually beneficial goals. Relationships riddled with conflict impede the attainment of those goals.”

“Discrepancies between the values, interests, and personalities of the members of a couple produce strife and conflict.”

“The search for the similar other provides an elegant solution to the adaptive problem of creating compatibility within the couple so that their interests are maximally aligned in the pursuit of mutual goals. … The marriage of a Democrat and a Republican or an abortion rights advocate with an abortion opponent can make for interesting discussions, but the ensuing conflict wastes valuable energy because their goals are incompatibly and their efforts cancel each other out.”

“Perhaps more important, matched couples maximize the smooth coordination of their efforts when pursuing mutual goals such as child rearing, maintaining kin alliances, and social networking. A couple at odds how to rear their child wasted valuable energy and also confuses the child, who receives contradictory messages. The search for similarity prevents couples from incurring these costs.”

The passages argue that long-term mating depends on sustained cooperation toward shared goals, which is undermined by conflict arising from mismatched values, interests, or personalities. Partner similarity functions as an adaptive mechanism that aligns goals, reduces friction, and conserves effort within the relationship. By minimizing conflict, matched couples are better able to coordinate child-rearing, social alliances, and other joint endeavors.

The features ‘Size and Strength,’ ‘Good Health,’ and ‘Love and Commitment’ are discussed in Part 3 of this chapter.

The feature ‘Intelligence’ is not discussed in this section, as it is discussed in greater depth in other sources.