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Definition
The phenomenon whereby women tend to marry men of a higher socioeconomic status than their own.
Introduction
There exists a stereotype that men are primarily attracted to looks while women are primarily attracted to status and wealth, meaning that, in terms of overall status, women tend to “marry up.” This is particularly obvious in instances where older men of considerable resources have relatively young and good-looking wives, such as in the case of US president Donald Trump (b. 1946) and his wife Melania (b. 1970), a Slovenian model who is 24 years younger than him.
Female Hypergamy and Evolution
There is a large body of evidence that women tend to marry up (hypergamously) in terms of status to a far greater extent than is the case with men. This tendency for women to be more interested in the status, or the potential to gain status, of a potential partner has been shown to exist across cultures. Kendrick and Keefe (1992) have shown that females...
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References
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Dutton, E. (2018). Women Marry Up. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_249-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_249-1
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