Dr. David Buss

Does he have drive?

Is he ambitious?

Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory is one way that I like to phrase it, because

Women often, they don't look at necessarily the resources that a guy possesses at this moment, but what is his trajectory?

Women attend to the attention structure.

So the attention structure is a key determinant of status.

So the people who are high in status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

Hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals or is he in an existential crisis not knowing what he's gonna do with his life?

Also, women use what's called in the literature mate choice copying.

So we've done studies where you just take a guy, photograph him alone, versus take the same guy, put an attractive woman next to him or put two women next to him, and women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive if he's paired with women.

From an evolutionary perspective, it's reasonable that women would prioritize

these qualities because of the tremendous asymmetry in our reproductive biology, namely that fertilization occurs internally within women.

Women bear the burdens of the nine-month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive, as well as

creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives.

And so one way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly.

And the benefits correspondingly of making a wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context.

But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species.

And so what do men value more than women?

Physical attractiveness.

So physical appearance provides a wealth of information about a person's health status, but also provides for men a wealth of information about a woman's fertility status.