Abstract

Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters' BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.

https://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(17)30315-X/fulltext

I'll just leave this completely open and non-judgmental. What do people make of this?

Women's desired traits remain constant but the bar is constantly bumped up as they move to higher income brackets.

Men's desired physical traits tend toward the plump female with slightly masculinized features when the male population is on the lower end of the income/resource spectrum and tend toward the thin female with more delicate features among more affluent male populations. However, men seem to universally prefer the 36:24:36 prefer ratio on women's bodies regardless of where men fall on the wealth bracket. I thought this was fairly interesting because it implies that there is a body shape men prefer but the specifications are decided by how safe they rate their environment.

Found this comment in another thread on this issue (without citation), kind of interesting.