The most dysfunctional participants in the online gender wars just faced a major blow. The traditionalist online right frequently opines about how, as one representative post on X recently put it, "[High-value] men would rather marry a humble, cute Waffle House waitress than deal with a empowered boss b*tch." But it turns out that the wealthier a man is, the more likely he is to marry a highly-educated woman.
"Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment," writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. "Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men."
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
