I came across this research done on a US dating site called OkCupid. Of particular interest was the graph with the title “How Many Messages a Man Gets, By Age & Income”. The authors sum up the situation:

…if you’re a young guy and don’t make much money, cool. If you’re 23 or older and don’t make much money, go die in a fire.

This of course was a US population, but I doubt it would be significantly different in NZ. Men seem to be in a double bind: on the one hand they are despised for earning a bit more for the kinds of jobs they tend to do while on the other hand they are valued and selected for earning more. (The only significant remaining justification now put forward for maintaining the NZ Ministry of Women’s Affairs is the mission to correct the sickening outrage that men earn around 20% more for the jobs they do, jobs that place men at about 100 times the risk of being killed or maimed relative to the jobs preferred by women).