For the study, Brown and co-author Brian Lewis from the University of California, Los Angeles  (UCLA) tested 120 male and 208 female undergraduates by asking them to rate their attraction and desire to affiliate with a man and a woman they were said to know from work.

"Imagine that you have just taken a job and that Jennifer (or John) is your immediate supervisor (or your peer, or your assistant)," study participants were told as they were shown a photo of a male or a female.

After seeing the photo and hearing the description of the person's role at work in relation to their own, participants were asked to use a 9-point Likert scale (1 is not at all, 9 is very much) to rate the extent to which they would enjoy going to a party with Jennifer or John, exercising with the person, dating the person and marrying the person.

Brown and Lewis found that males, but not females, were most strongly attracted to subordinate partners for high-investment activities such as marriage and dating.

"Our results demonstrate that male preference for subordinate women increases as the investment in the relationship increases," Brown said. "This pattern is consistent with the possibility that there were reproductive advantages for males who preferred to form long-term relationships with relatively subordinate partners.

"Given that female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males only when investment is high, a preference for subordinate partners may provide adaptive benefits to males in the context of only long-term, investing relationships---not one-night stands."

According to Brown, the current findings are consistent with earlier research showing that expressions of vulnerability enhance female attractiveness. "Our results also provide further explanation for why males might attend to dominance-linked characteristics of women such as relative age or income, and why adult males typically prefer partners who are younger and make less money."

The New York Times quoted Dr. Ellen Berscheid, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who said relational dominance, could mean different things in a different study - like one that created hypothetical mates who were richer or poorer than the research subjects. With a money comparison, she said, "the results may well have been quite different."

Dr. Berscheid said that while "the results may be interesting in terms of assessing probability of workplace romantic relationships" under some circumstances, "I think they probably say little about evolution and human behavior."

In an interview, Dr. Brown conceded that evolutionary causes could not always be teased out of behavior, saying, "I don't think it's ever possible to really separate out what proportion of a behavior is shaped by evolutionary history and which parts are shaped by our environment or culture."

Paz Vega, Tea Leoni and Adam Sandler in "Spanglish" Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

In early January, the UK Sunday Times newspaper, published a study by four British universities, which found that a high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men.

The study found that the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 percent for boys for each 16 point increase in IQ.  However, for girls, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16 point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The study is based on the IQs of 900 men and women between their 10th and 40th birthdays.

"Women in their late 30s who have gone for careers after the first flush of university and who are among the brightest of their generation are finding that men are just not interesting enough," said psychologist and professor at Nottingham University Paul Brown in The Sunday Times.

Claire Rayner, writer and broadcaster, is quoted in the article as saying that intelligent men often preferred a less brainy partner.

"A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way."

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that she has noticed a trend of famous and powerful men taking up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

"Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as 'the moon, the sun and the stars.' It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods," Dowd writes.

Dowd says that in all the great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals and she refers to the recently released movie Spanglish, with Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, who falls for his hot Mexican maid.

The maid, who cleans up after Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm.