The Gold Digger: Are Women Trading Beauty for Big Money?
McClintock’s “Beauty and Status: The Illusion of Exchange in Partner Selection?” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43187555.pdf
The idea of the “gold digger” is constant in the media, and centers mostly around the idea of young, hot women looking for an older, less attractive man who has a lot of money. This idea has been supported in the past by evolutionary ideas that men look for more attractive mates while women look for breadwinners.
This claim, called the beauty-status exchange theory, asserts that beautiful women have traded their attractiveness for men with more money. It is an idea that has been supported by research in the past. However, Elizabeth Aura McClintock set out to examine whether this claim was really true. She changed her measurement of status from current years of education, to things like projected socioeconomic status and projected income. McClintock also argued that in relationships, men tend to also be older in comparison to their partner, which would explain the appearance of men having spent more time in school. By changing the factors and variables of the study, McClintock hoped to create a more realistic study, not influenced by unimportant variables.
First, McClintock looked into past studies about what men and women find most important in a potential mate. The most important factor seems to be finding a partner similar to oneself, which is called matching. For example, those who come from the same socioeconomic status tend to pair up much more than those who do not. Since the socioeconomic status is also related to how attractive they are, the two variables are not exclusive, but inform each other. Therefore, since people choose partners with the same level of education achievement, they are also choosing people who are similarly attractive.
The beauty-status exchange theory falls flat in McClintock’s study, as she found that couples matched with attractiveness level, whether or not they differed in status. This is in direct contradiction of what the beauty-status exchange theory claims, which would have been that more attractive women were choosing less attractive men.
In the end, the idea of the “gold digger” can no longer be considered a common occurrence. Basically, men and women like to date people who are similar to them, whether that be how much money they make, how much education they have obtained, or how attractive they are.
