Just 11% of women say their ‘ideal match’ can make less money than them: survey

Women are far less likely to be attracted to someone who earns less than them than most men are, a new poll found.

Only an average of 11% of women said their “ideal partner” could earn less than them, while an average of 61% of men said their ideal partner could make less, the poll from matchmaking service Keeper found.

That means a vast majority of women — 89% — cared about their partners being the breadwinners, while men were much less concerned about it, with just 39% of men saying they were interested in higher earners.

The poll drew on 9,630 Keeper users — 6,251 men and 3,401 women, most of whom were heterosexual — between July 1 and Sept. 8, whose sign-up forms asked about marriage preferences to help the AI-driven platform better align them with potential matches.

Those preferences buck recent social trends — wives earning more than husbands tripled in the last 50 years, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study which found 55% of American households have a male breadwinner and 16% have a female.

But Keeper founder Jake Kozloski thinks contemporary culture and historical culture — along with people’s interior inclinations born of those cultures — will inevitably be out of step, leading to the kind of results his study found.

“We’re evolved to have certain preferences as men and women on average, and I think one of the preferences that women pretty clearly have — and that’s been replicated cross-culturally and in a lot of academic research — is a preference for higher socioeconomic status,” Kozloski told The Post.

“Culture can only override so much biology, right?” he added, pointing to a 2020 study of 45 countries which found women tended to prefer older providers and men tended to prefer younger lookers.

However, men and women’s preferences did tend to change as each earned more money in the Keeper study — sometimes drastically.

Only 10% of women making less than $50,000 per year said their ideal partner could earn less than them — while women earning $250,000 and above were twice as likely — 20% — to say ideal partners could make less.

That trend also followed for men, though not as severely — 57% of men making $50,000 or under said their partner could make less than them, while 79% making $250,000 or more said the same.

And while the Keeper survery asked users about their ideal partner’s income profile — speaking to a general image of overall attractiveness — nearly none listed income profiles as “dealbreakers” that would exclude a potential match in their search for love.

Only about 1 in 200 Keeper users — about .5% — listed financial needs as a non-negotiable, while just 1 in 1,000 — .1% — explicitly specified an earning threshold on their profile, Kozloski said.

“In practice, true deal breakers are rare,” he said. “You’d be hard pressed to find any married person who says, ‘Yes, my spouse has zero flaws.’ So it’s just a matter of getting as close as you can, not finding true perfection.”

Another study, meanwhile, found that the husbands who made less money than their wives were more likely to report mental distress than those who are the breadwinners.

Among husbands whose wives earn at least 70% of household income, the risk of “serious psychological distress” is almost two and a half times as high, according to the study from the Economist, which analyzed 17 years of data.

Keeper — which has users fill out an extensive questionnaire and uses AI to identify matches — boasts about 1.6 million sign-ups, and claims an impressive 1 in 10 marriage rate for first dates it set up.

“Instead of a swipe app that gives you a thousand matches, we’ll give you one match,” said Kozloski. “But it’s going to be a damn good match.”