Is:

• Looking for a mate you can look up to and want to emulate
• Ensuring you have the best possible mate for you and your offspring
• A form of natural selection to weed out the low quality mates and their low quality genes
• A way to gain future security (minimizes stress and risk)
• A way to find a more attractive mate (if all things are ceteris paribus, and a woman has the option between dating a hot guy she loves, or an ugly guy she loves, once again with all things being equal, she'll pick the more attractive person) No duh, right...
• A way to find someone who is ambitious and focused on having a good life (who wants a partner with a bad future? no one!)

Isn't:

• Gold digging (Generally, women are a lot more interested in working toward a stable, secure relationship with a man they love, care for, and find attractive than they are with draining a man’s bank account.)
• Necessarily a way to improve one's own status, just to make sure they are with someone who themselves has a higher status/more respected
• About only money. Hypergamy goes much, much deeper than that
• Spurred from the gender wage gap. It is natural across all societies, even modern societies in which women make similar pay and can have similar roles. Hypergamy persists despite pay.

We need hypergamy in our society, it's healthy and vital to a prosperous culture.
Those who act like it's all negative or all about gold-digging, they've been brainwashed to only look at the bad and never admit to the goods of hypergamy.

Our lives would be even worse today had hypergamy, especially female hypergamy, never existed.