The kind of industry a person works in appears to say very little about what they look for in a romantic partner, according to new research published in Personality and Individual Differences. Across seven countries, a person’s sex and whether they were imagining a short-term or long-term relationship were far more strongly linked to partner preferences than whether they worked in a people-focused, things-focused, or ideas-focused sector.
Vocational interests refer to the broad preferences that guide people toward certain types of work. Psychologists often map these interests along a spectrum that contrasts working with people, like nursing or teaching, with working with objects or systems, like engineering or logistics. A second dimension contrasts working with data and working with ideas, as in technology or finance; the researchers combined these into an “abstract” category. Interest theory treats these career interests as expressions of personality rather than just a taste for specific daily tasks.
If career interests reflect deep parts of personality, they might shape other major life choices, such as picking a partner. Men and women also differ markedly along the people-versus-things dimension: a 2009 meta-analysis found that men generally lean toward working with things and women toward working with people. This divide appears across cultures, as noted in a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 showing a global trend of women preferring people-oriented jobs and men preferring things-oriented occupations.
At the same time, relationship research has established that partner preferences differ by biological sex and relationship goals. The authors of a 1993 paper proposing sexual strategies theory argued, with supporting evidence, that what people prioritize in a partner changes dramatically depending on whether they are looking for a short-term fling or a long-term commitment. The new research brings these two lines of work together to test whether the dispositions that draw people to certain kinds of work also shape their romantic preferences.
The research was led by Peter K. Jonason of Vizja University and Dritjon Gruda, an invited associate professor of organizational behavior at Católica Porto Business School, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and lecturer at Maynooth University School of Business.
“Vocational psychologists treat whether you are drawn to people or to things as a deep part of personality, more stable over time than the Big Five and very different between men and women,” Gruda told PsyPost. “If that holds, a pediatric nurse and a structural engineer should want different things in a partner, and nobody had checked whether they do.”
The Big Five refers to the five broad traits psychologists commonly use to describe personality, such as extraversion and conscientiousness.
To answer this question, the researchers recruited 1,974 adults (968 men and 982 women) through Prolific from seven countries, including the United States, Germany, and South Africa. The participants completed an online survey about their current employment and their romantic preferences. The researchers grouped participants into three occupational orientations based on their current industry: people-oriented (746 workers), things-oriented (289 workers), and abstract-oriented (710 workers).
To measure mate preferences, the team used a forced-choice task. In each of ten pairings, participants picked which of two traits mattered more from a set of five qualities: physicality (attractiveness and fitness), compassion (warmth and kindness), competence (intelligence and capability), compatibility (shared values and lifestyle), and character (honesty and moral values).
Participants completed this task twice, once imagining a short-term relationship and once imagining a long-term partnership, with the order varied across participants. Because each person made 10 choices per scenario, a trait chosen at an average rate would score 2. Choosing one trait meant passing on another, allowing the researchers to measure the relative priority of each quality on a scale from zero to four.
The results showed that occupational orientation had almost no association with partner preferences. The researchers used equivalence tests, which check whether a difference is small enough to count as negligible rather than simply failing to find one. By this standard, people-oriented and things-oriented workers made practically identical choices for competence and compatibility in both scenarios, and for character in the long-term scenario. Abstract-oriented workers, whom the researchers expected to favor character and compatibility, also chose these traits at rates equivalent to everyone else.
“Your job says very little about what you want in a partner,” Gruda explained. “Among 1,974 adults in seven countries, the sector people worked in had almost no bearing on how often they picked looks, compassion, competence, compatibility, or character. Their sex, and whether they were imagining a fling or a long-term relationship, mattered far more.”
Because things-oriented jobs were held mostly by men (68 percent) and people-oriented jobs mostly by women (63 percent), the researchers analyzed occupation and sex together. Things-oriented workers did choose physical attractiveness somewhat more often than people-oriented workers, but accounting for sex removed about two-thirds of that gap, leaving only a small difference.
The association the authors highlight involved compassion. In the long-term scenario, men in people-oriented jobs chose compassion more often than men in things-oriented jobs (an average of 2.21 versus 1.76 choices out of four), while women chose it at nearly identical rates regardless of sector. Because the researchers tested many outcomes, they applied a stricter threshold to guard against chance findings, and this link did not meet it; it also vanished when things-oriented workers were left out, so the authors treat it as exploratory.
The persistence of the sex difference within the same kinds of jobs stood out to the researchers. “Men in people-focused work like teaching and care, where most colleagues are women, still picked compassion less often than the women next to them,” Gruda noted. “The one occupational link we found, with people-oriented men valuing compassion more in a long-term partner, was small and did not survive correction for multiple tests.”
Sex and relationship context, by contrast, were consistently linked to partner preferences. In both long-term and short-term scenarios, men chose physical attractiveness more often than women did, while women chose compassion and competence more often than men did. For example, in long-term relationships, men chose physicality at an average rate of 1.13 choices compared to 0.60 choices for women, while women chose compassion 2.51 times versus 2.08 times for men. Men and women did not differ in how often they chose compatibility, and differed only slightly on character.
Relationship context reorganized priorities far more heavily than occupation did. When considering a short-term relationship rather than a long-term one, participants selected physicality nearly three times as often, jumping from an average of 0.85 choices to 2.33 choices. To accommodate this focus on looks, choices for compatibility, compassion, and character each fell by roughly half a choice, while competence dipped only slightly.
“Occupation explained extremely little in how often people picked any one trait,” Gruda pointed out. “Relationship context mattered far more.”
The pattern of choices was broadly similar across the seven countries, though some differences emerged, such as fewer compassion choices in Germany and Poland. Country accounted for about five times as much of the variation in compassion choices as occupation did, which the authors take as evidence that the task could detect group differences where they existed.
The authors interpret the weak role of occupation as support for the view that partner preferences are shaped by psychological mechanisms specialized for mating, rather than by the broad dispositions that steer people toward particular kinds of work. Because sex differences in career interests emerge early in life, they suggest sex may shape both the jobs people hold and what they want in a partner, though the study’s single-snapshot design cannot confirm this.
“For me, the main finding is that knowing the industry where somebody works tells us rather little about their partner preferences, once sex is taken into account,” said Toivo Aavik, an associate professor of individual and social psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, who has expertise in sexology and mate preferences and was not involved in the research. “Whether the person is thinking about a short-term or a long-term relationship makes a much larger difference. The results concerning sex and relationship context are broadly in line with previous research. The more novel part is the weak association with industry.”
“But here I see the main limitation: the study measured current industry, not vocational interests themselves,” Aavik continued. “These are related, but they are not the same thing. A nurse and a data analyst may both work in healthcare, while having quite different interests and daily tasks. Therefore, I would not yet conclude that vocational interests have little relevance for partner preferences.”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study used the participants’ current employment industry as a stand-in for their actual vocational interests. People work where they do for practical reasons such as income, availability, or location, meaning a person’s current field may not reflect their underlying interests.
Gruda acknowledged the limitation while also cautioning against oversimplifying the findings. “We measured the industry people work in, not their vocational interests, and people take jobs for all sorts of reasons,” he said. “That noise would hide a real effect rather than create a false one, yet the same task picked up country differences several times larger than anything occupational. The results also do not mean men want only looks and women only kindness, because for a long-term partner both sexes picked character and compatibility most often.”
Measuring vocational interests directly with specialized assessments, rather than relying on current industry, could provide a more direct test in future investigations. The noise introduced by using industry as a proxy might make subtle associations harder to detect.
“I have reasonable confidence in the narrower result,” Aavik said. “The sample is relatively large, includes seven countries, and the authors used equivalence tests. This is a strength, because finding no statistically significant difference is not sufficient evidence that a difference is small. But still, a large sample cannot fully compensate for an indirect measure of the central concept.”
The forced-choice task also asked participants to choose between broad, abstract traits. While this approach reveals which general qualities people prioritize, real-world dating involves weighing complex combinations of these traits in actual people.
“Participants chose between desirable qualities in hypothetical relationship contexts,” Aavik observed. “Choosing attractiveness more often necessarily leaves fewer choices for other qualities. It does not mean that kindness or honesty is no longer valued. Also, these are average differences between groups; they tell us much less about a particular man or woman.”
The researchers also excluded participants who identified as non-binary or reported a sexual orientation other than heterosexual because those groups were too small to analyze separately. In addition, all seven countries in the sample were Western, industrialized nations, which leaves open the question of whether similar patterns would appear in other cultural settings.
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to build on this line of inquiry. “We would like to measure vocational interests directly instead of inferring them from industry, and to test samples beyond our seven Western countries,” Gruda stated.
Aavik similarly outlined key priorities for future investigations. “What I would most like to see next is a study measuring vocational interests directly and following actual romantic choices,” he told PsyPost. “From a sexology perspective, I would also want sexual compatibility to be assessed explicitly and sufficient representation of people (maybe) with different sexual orientations and/or gender identities.”
The study, “Sex, love, and work: What you do is not whom you want,” was authored by Peter K. Jonason and Dritjon Gruda.