JAMES TARANTO: Rich Woman, Poor Man: Why do female breadwinners tend to have unhappy marriages? “Note that Thaler considers only explanations in which men are to blame–either for subjecting their wives to ‘bad marriages’ from which greater earning power can liberate them, or for ‘clinging,’ like Barack Obama’s stereotypical Pennsylvanians of pallor, to retrograde ‘social norms.’ Couldn’t it be that women’s preference for high-earning men is the mechanism by which female economic success leads to the decline of marriage? . . . Implicit in Thaler’s analysis is the economist’s model of individuals as rational maximizers of self-interest. That model would indeed predict that anyone of either sex would prefer–all else being equal–a higher-earning spouse. Since the evidence shows that women do and men do not, these premises lead to the conclusion male mate preference is irrational.”

The rule on gender research, as Ann Althouse noted years ago, is that you can find any difference between men and women that you want, so long as you portray it in ways that establish women’s superiority.