Your income potential, as a female, does not matter, something else that we all know is true. I don’t care about your one male friend who only dates women with Harvard MBA’s, it means nothing, so you can save it. Your meandering post dances around the elephant in the room and smacks of desperation.

And the rest of Mr. Hanson’s description is pretty fair. Why bother criticizing tone when there’s substance to talk about?

But yes, I’d be interested in some data on how people choose in circumstances where there’s more opportunity for the “deeper” traits to be revealed. Anyone know where to find this?

I think you have to be rather un-shallow to go into hard sciences; you really have to care about non-superficial things. Fashion is nothing but shallow and superficial and women seem to fall for that.

The genders equally shallow? Or do we have a clear winner in the most-shallow-gender contest?

Also interesting to note Nobel prizes per country/IQ
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Nobels.aspx

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

@Grant: i am not disputing that women (and men) thought looks were less important relative to earnings than turned out to be the case. that is clear from the data. Robin could have very reasonably said, “what women [and/or men] think they want is different from what they actually want.” and if the stats show that women misjudge their own preferences by more than men do, then there is no problem saying so. but that is not the statement presented here. instead, he states that “women think they are different [presumably from men, because men are the norm/standard for everything, right?] but they are not,” when the data that follow say nothing about that. women were not asked what they think men want, so there is no information here about whether they would attribute to men preferences that were similar to or different from their own.

even if one wants to argue that it’s fair to say women think they’re different because their stated preferences differed from men’s, it still makes no sense to single out one sex. he could use the same logic and data to snipe that “men think they’re different, but they’re not.” in which case, why not skip the sniping altogether and simply state that men and women both think they are different from each other (but they are not)?

[apologies to all for comment length.]

I think its pretty clear that women thought they placed less emphasis on looks than they actually did. However, I agree with the others in that this result could partially be due to the speed-dating process.

I’m not familiar enough with statistics to say if men’s claims were equally inaccurate (can anyone read the study and tell us?), but most studies I’ve seen indicate that women’s claimed preferences and demonstrated preferences diverge more than men’s.