Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?
Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.
This gets a little into the 'things you can't say' territory, but online dating just isn't very good for most heterosexual men due to selective pressures (it's probably better when the population is closer to an even split, but even then there are problems). This does change as men get older and there's less competition (online dating is bad for men in their 20s and good in their 30s).
Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data you can look at to see some of the problems.
One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages (making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the response graph itself.
There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around 4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.
For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.
For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills required for success.
For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression. These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).
If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part is less important.
I don't know... I'm absolutely nowhere near the top 10% of male attractiveness, but I've had good luck getting dates on dating sites. From talking with many women about their experience on such sites, I think that attractiveness is far less important than behavior -- the vast majority of men that women hear from, it seems, are very poorly behaved.
Where do you live? I think city is highly variable. It also gets easier as you get older (for heterosexual men) which could be a factor.
This is the kind of thing where you can’t trust what people say since what they say and how they act are very different (the dataclysm book is good for this).
For the matching case if you get zero matches you can’t progress to dates (or even chat). The selection happens prior to that.
You're probably right though that it's not only attractiveness, there's also a selective pressure where men are generally okay dating 'down' economically and women are generally not. While more women become economically successful (good thing) it further constrains the availability on the dating market. The only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.
My experience has covered a number of different areas (in the US), and I've used such sites occasionally for a couple of decades now. I've not noticed a significant difference between areas or age ranges.
But I'm working with male sample size of one (me), and a female sample size (women I've talked about this stuff with) of a few dozen, so this isn't anything like a reliable study. It's just anecdotal.
> The only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.
Pictures of exotic vacations and the gear they’re wearing are plenty evidence of economic strength. You have time to go on far flung vacations and money to spend on them and the gear.
Similar here. Nowhere near the top in attractiveness; had pretty good experiences on match; ended up meeting my wife playing beer league level softball, but match absolutely “worked”.
In spending time with female friends who were doing online dating, it became fairly clear to me how easy it was to be in the top 10% of articulate and interesting in correspondence.
If you don't look that bad from a quick glance, it's generally still possible to get dates. But while a guy might be excited about that date he has next Wednesday night, there are definitely plenty more women who can meet up with different people most nights of the week if they wanted to.
By talking with women. According to the majority of them, I'm very average-looking. Fortunately, most women don't really prioritize physical attractiveness -- they tend to value personality-related things instead.
I suspect that’s actually not a good indicator. What people say and how they act are not the same for this.
You may not be in the top 1%, but could still easily be in the top 10% - 20%. If the selection only happens in that range then I could see someone on the lower end of the top 10% being called “average” (if the selectors only consider the top % as the entire range).
For online dating the data doesn’t really agree with the prioritization on personality for initial contact. Though this is still highly variable depending on age and the city you’re in.
So from that data, which I have no reason to doubt, women have the edge, especially more attractive women. Men have a distinct disadvantage which was also apparent from the gender skew.
If women have an edge there, especially more attractive ones, I would expect more would join to gain that advantage. Likewise, men having such unfavorable odds, I would expect they would drop out. But AFAICT, the gender skew has remained pretty static across time and across apps.
So why don't women (especially more attractive ones) join to get the advantage and why do men keep joining if the odds are against them? Do the apps repel (attractive) women? Do they even need the advantage? I would expect attractive women don't have the problem of needing to find dates but maybe not.
Maybe attractiveness is just a relative thing and you need to have such a gender skew for women to filter out who is attractive and who isn't.
Purely speculative and something I haven't thought that much about, but my immediate answer is that men are more desperate and trying everything they can.
Women have an easier time getting attention/dates in general so fewer of them bother with online dating at all.
> bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC)
Really? Considering the continual emphasis on social issues I hear out of the Bay Area, I thought it would have been far more evenly distributed than other parts of the country.
Tech industry is male skewed and immigrant friendly, so there is a constant import effect of economically attractive men with usually not as good social skills.
The Tech Industry is the big industry of the bay area, like Hollywood in LA, Finance, Journalism & Fashion in NYC, Law & Non-Profits in DC or Oil in Houston so that causes an issue in the singles market.
On top of that, a large amount of the hiring is in the South bay, while the singles tend to live in SF or the north east bay.
NYC is known for being female skewed, because fashion & journalism is probably female skewed and finance is neutral. DC is probably female skewed because law is neutral and non-profits are female skewed and so on.
If you look at maps of female/male ratios of various age cohorts, you will also notice that the entire west coast is male skewed in the author's age cohort.
So many words to say the simple truth, women are not interested in technology and don't want to work at those jobs.
Also, the immigrants got perfectly good social skills, the only problem is that American women, especially from the left side of the political map, are racist. Men don't really care and will date anyone, conservative women usually grow up in lower socio economic parts of the country and are less judgmental. But good luck finding a white lefty woman to date if you are Indian or Asian. Not saying it never happens, but it is pretty rare.
I was saying immigrant friendly to denote that the industry imports a lot of people, more than a less immigrant friendly industry, say hollywood. It creates a constant inflow of new single people more than other industries.
Us software people in general have bad social skills on average compared to say, hollywood or fashion people.
And I brought up how other industries that are more gender skewed in the other direction create an imbalance in the other way on the dating market. It wasn't passing judgement about the why of the gender skew.
My focus was about explaining the simple supply/demand math that causes issues on the west coast.
My anecdata was that I found a great many women on Tinder and other sites where I live (Washington, DC). Not fake profiles; I had plenty of dates. I like to think that I'm a good catch, but I don't think I'm exceptionally physically attractive, and am certainly not wealthy. (I was working for a startup and often made no money at all.) I don't believe I was doing anything other men couldn't replicate.
I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)
Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.
DC is a great place (for heterosexual men) to find dates - I found the ability to get dates via apps to be highly variable depending on the city (maybe M/F ratio, but probably a bunch of factors).
If you want to see this for yourself just change your city in the apps from SF to NYC or DC and swipe. It's pretty obvious and dramatic.
I'm curious if this imbalanced market effect happens with gay demographics anywhere? Are certain cities known to be 'bad' for certain gay demographics other than for homophobia reasons. Like not homophobic, but still bad for some reason?
well, that is awfully low bandwidth in an internet-connected world. you may only be exposed to 500 potential mates that way. in a market like NYC, merely being on tinder would probably expose you to orders of magnitude more than that! makes sense to leverage tech to parlay your assets (e.g. attractiveness/mating value) to reach a wider audience in order to get highest possible match you can.
I believe this is the root problem of all dating "apps" or websites, assuming the goal is for two people to find each other and settle down.
Without computers, databases, and the internet, you might only have so many chances to meet someone, and so you are mentally ready to accept someone that may be a few bands "below" you. And you might grow to like them.
But with so much of the cost and friction gone, and a seemingly infinite number of chances to meet someone, especially in bigger cities, that mentality is gone. Why accept someone who might be okay for you when you can aim higher? And if everyone has this mentality, then you can see where the market goes.
I also think there is an issue with wealth/income gap and easy availability of data rendering certain people who aren't seen as able to be economically viable mates to have a value so low as to not be worth dating period.
Because you have to compromise? That’s my point, is that the infinite selection offered by online dating makes it seem like you don’t have to compromise, whereas the years go by and you keep losing value as you age.
Not that there’s anything wrong with dealbreakers, and maybe they are warranted, but it all depends how much you want to get married.
women control natural selection since birth control, of course they don't need these apps. It is the same for night clubs etc... no entry fee for women, some dating apps do the same, you have to pay if you're a dude, but it is free if you're a female.
An average looking women will never have any issue finding someone to date, an average looking guy on the other hand...
> “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals.
> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says.
> While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things)
The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.
> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners
Have you tried? I'm in my 30s having the easiest dating life and I can totally understand the results if that one study pointing out that men peak in attractiveness at like 36.
If you aren't finding dates in your 30s, then I doubt you were ever successful with women, assuming you didn't just let yourself go.
Not sure what other response is appropriate here other than "lol yes."
> I doubt you were ever successful with women
Arguably true, at least in that there doesn't seem to be some program of personal activity I can follow that reliably results in dates leading that lead to a relationship.
Arguably false, in that periodically something just happens (sometimes through my efforts, more often not) and there's a strong connection and it grows into a months or years long relationship.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not saying I find it impossible. I'm saying I find it so hard to relate to "an “endless supply” of possible partners" that I'm inclined to look on it pretty skeptically. If it were just me, then I'd consider the likelihood that I'm a bit of a niche good with some niche tastes, or I just need to work through some dating equivalent of _Cracking the Coding Interview_, but I know from conversations with my friends over the last 10 years that I'm far from the only one who's perceived their mid-to-late 30s dating life through a lens of non-abundance.
Lifting gains convert to dating gains in my experience. Property owner, stable job, financially secure, in shape in your 30s and you’re punching above most of the unpaired competition.
> Women just aren’t using these apps
Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?
Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.