The idea was around long before Gwen Verdon first sung, “Hey, big spender.  Spend a little time with me.”

Women, the story goes, are unduly attracted to guys with fat wallets.  Money is the great equalizer.  A rich, fat bald guy can still hook up with the supermodel.  A nice car and some great clothes will make a man far more attractive to the opposite sex.  You’ve heard the tale.  Women love money.  Women are gold-diggers.  Get the money, get the girl.

It’s a frequently parrotted notion, but is it really true?  Does the big spender really have the edge with women over the tightwad, all other things being equal?

Instead of relying on “Sweet Charity” song lyrics and the laments of men who didn’t get the girl of their dreams to agree to a date, let’s look at the money/sex appeal connection a little differently.  Let’s use some real research this time around.

Are women more attracted to guys with money?  Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health seems to think so.  Kruger headed a study that solicited information from over 400 people about both their spending habits and their romantic lives.  The findings are enough to give a poor man another reason to feel miserable.

LiveScience summarizes one conclusion that supports the “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” theory:

Men who spent more (saved less) and who were more likely to shell out more than they earned reported having more sexual partners the past five years and desired more future partners than other guys in the study.

Specifically, the 25 percent of men who were most conservative about spending had an average of three partners in the past five years and desired about one partner in the next five years. The 2 percent of men with the riskiest financial strategies had double those numbers.

In other words, the guy who’s willing to flash some cash seems to have better odds of finding women who will be sexually interested in him.  Note that this discusses spending habits, not true wealth.  That means that a poor guy might still stand a chance–if he was sufficiently financially irresponsible, that is.

So, it’s a closed case, right?  The big spender gets the girl.

Not so fast.  The folks at Fair Isaac took a break from computing and reporting your credit score to do a little research of their own.  They found that 24% of women ranked financial responsibility as the most important trait in selecting a mate.  It out-polled sex.  A much larger percentage put it near the top of their lists.

This lust for financial responsibility, at first glance, seems to be at odds with the Kruger research and its claim that spending dough like a drunken sailor was the way to land a woman.  Fair Isaac, on the other hand, seems to think that the opinions of folks like this blogger are more representative of what makes the female heart go pitter-patter.

Who’s right?

It turns out that both studies may be onto something.  Mary Pilon explains:

Men who have a greater tendency to maximize their display of economic power (even if this means racking up credit card debt to do it) score relatively higher in mating effort. Punchline: those who show more bling have more partners in the short run, but the savers tend to do better when it comes to marital bliss. Those who enter into a committed relationship shift away from seeking mates and “towards investment in the relationship and potential offspring,” he writes. Here, the savers are rewarded.

Personally, I think the whole issue is a little more complicated than what we’ve been led to believe and I don’t think it’s really safe to generalize these findings to a point where we begin to make any assumptions about any individual.  However, if you want to approach the research the way some folks have, spend money to get the woman.  Save money to keep her.