Women lie about their age men lie about their income.

Feather’s epigram trades in a familiar early‑20th‑century social stereotype: that courtship and status encourage selective self-presentation. “Age” and “income” stand for two culturally policed measures of desirability—youth for women and financial provision for men—implying that each sex feels pressure to misrepresent the trait most scrutinized. Read as satire, it critiques how social markets (dating, marriage, respectability) reward appearances over candor. Read more critically, it also reflects and reinforces gendered expectations by treating them as universal truths, which is part of why the line persists as a quotable, if dated, observation about vanity and social performance.