It is true that women generally want a partner who makes the same or more than them, while men generally find income/career status less important in mate selection. That is a scientific fact before you politicize it. And it’s also a fact that as more women receive higher education and fair pay, the pool of men who make the same or more than the average woman will shrink pretty dramatically.

So it is true to say that as women become empowered and more able to care for themselves without the help of a man, the majority of lower-income and males with a lower socioeconomic status will have a much harder time finding a mate. This mostly affects men negatively at a younger age when their earnings are lowest and they sit closest to the bottom of that hierarchy. Conversely, the negative impacts hit women later on when the end of their child-bearing years approaches and they realize that putting a family on hold to focus on their career may have been a more permanent decision than they’d intended now that they’ve moved up the economic ladder and the small proportion of men at or above their level are either already taken or happy to play the field non-monogamously.

It hits both genders just as hard and it’s an issue we need to solve. Our evolutionary psychology and mate selection processes just haven’t caught up with modern society. And since males are more prone to isolation and suicide, we see the affects against them more readily. But the affects to women will become more apparent in the next few decades.

I know this is politically charged territory, but it’s pretty well established from a sociological and evolutionary psychology perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_preferences#:~:text=Mate preference priorities,-Research has been&text=In the study%2C it was,attractiveness%2C as the highest priorities.

Edit: Changed “lower-status males” to “males with a lower socioeconomic status” since that seems to be a trigger-word for some folks.