Pricing the Biological Clock: The Marriage Market Costs of Aging to Women

Women who make time-costly career investments may face a penalty on the marriage market due to lower fecundity. Using an innovative experiment where online daters are recruited to rate profiles with randomly assigned age, incentivized with customized advice based on their ratings, I find a causal negative impact of age on women’s marriage market value. For every year a woman ages, she must earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive to potential partners. This penalty is driven entirely by men who have no children and are aware of the age–fertility tradeoff, demonstrating the connection to fecundity.