I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.
This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them. If you went to a singles bar, you'd find that all drinks bought for strangers were purchased by men for women.
As others have pointed out, the choice of different cities interferes with what you were trying to demonstrate, though the effect size was so huge it was difficult to not confirm it despite the confounding factor.
I think he had a good time doing the experiment, so it wasn't really "trouble". Trouble is when you spend a year and a half performing experiments for data that you need as the foundation of your PhD, only to find them available for free in German off of the University of Hannover's website.
I just started using it after I moved to a new city. I have had some great dates, and even met some friends who introduced me to their friends so I’m certainly not complaining about the site, but I have two observations I would love to have the understanding behind.
1st, what is the purpose of the green/yellow/red dot? To me, if I see a women with a yellow or green dot I rarely if ever contact them. Also, the percentage of women with red dots is ridiculous compared with the other colors. It basically seems like a worthless indicator of anything and may even be harmful since it causes people to select the red over the yellow etc.
As a guy, if I get messages from women and they are someone I may or may not have contacted, I never respond to get my color back up to yellow. I can’t keep it there long, and have to check using a fake profile, but feel like the gamesmanship is worth it.
2nd, why say exactly when someone was online last? This encourages me to not login random times since I don’t want people seeing that I am always checking in. Even if I am bored somewhere, have nothing else to look at, I purposely don’t go to the site to let it sit. You would generate more ad revenue, at least from me if the site said, visited in last 48 hours or whatever.
FYI, for those trying the site, 2 things really surprised me. 1, the photo selection tool, I can’t remember the name, was really useful as it let me pick better photos of myself. 2, focusing on having a profile that was more about stuff I was doing was better than a profile about who I am. (that may be me specific).
You realize for someone to see that you're checking in all the time they'd also have to be checking in all the time and stalking your profile ?
I don't know OKCs reasoning behind it but I can think of a bunch of arguments. For example say you've messaged someone to rearrange a date and you want to make sure they've logged in since you sent it, or say you want to catch them online and want to know the best time, etc.
I’m reacting to my thought process in viewing women’s profiles. If I visit a profile just twice I have a pretty good idea that they are checking it every day etc. If both times I visit they were online within the last 2 hours (extreme example) I know they are checking it a lot.
While that information doesn’t really matter, I noticed that I sort of laugh about it to myself and make assumptions about the person. If I am making assumptions, women are making assumptions and if the environment is as highly competitive as described, you really don’t want anything against you.
There is no way to know, but before I message someone I usually look at their profile, wait at least a day, then read it carefully before messaging them.
In the beginning I would just message women right away, but after a few dates that I could have avoided I decided to be more careful since there is no reason to go out with someone you know will not work.
[by the way] I saw a comment you posted a few weeks ago and liked it so I went to your old blog imranontech.com and read through a bunch of your articles. Really good stuff.
1. The dot indicates the likelihood the person would respond. I would imagine it's an attempt to encourage people to try talking to others that are less than perfect, since they are more likely to respond.
2. Because if they haven't been online in 3 months I don't want to waste my time emailing them.
I haven't been on OKCupid in years, so this info may be outdated, but they used to display a green/yellow/red dot to indicate whether or not someone usually responds when you initiate contact with them. Most women have red dots because you probably won't get any response from them whatsoever if you send them a message.
There are no plans to permanently stop doing posts as far as I know. OkCupid's user base has been growing rapidly over the past year, to put it mildly, but we're still only ~30 people so we haven't had much time for the more peripheral aspects of the site. I know there are some things in the works, but I'm not directly involved so I can't really give a time estimate.
I glad we have someone from OKCupid on here. Just want to let you know personally that I tried everything when I moved to a new city. Match, PlentyOfFish, and a billion others I can't remember. I got good at writing profiles.
OKCupid did an auto-match for someone I didn't find during my own searches. I thought I looked at everything. We apparently thought each other were attractive enough, and thats what spawned the initial prod from OKCupid.
The similarities didn't stop there. This was 4 years ago and now I have an amazing wife, the perfect wife. She makes me a better person.
It is fairly easy for me to say I would have never met this woman without OKCupid (the site, and the science that drives it). Your service has literally changed my life permanently, for the better. And you did it without charging me a thing. So thank you, and hopefully you guys keep your spirit and innovation as part of a larger match.com portfolio!
while I am glad you have found someone, I would bet that it had very little to do with okcupid, but rather your emotional availability and confidence. If you could have been cloned and A/B tested, I bet B would have met someone just the same in real life without okcupid.
It's like saying I'm so grateful to Muni for introducing me to my gf because I met her waiting for the bus. The bus had nothing to do with it.
That's good to hear, but with the last post being over a year old, it's firmly in dead blog land right now. You guys have a fascinating collection of data available to you, and since (I'm assuming) you'd never release it, your posts are the only view the rest of the world has into it.
If you wouldn't mind, could you poke whoever is in charge of the blog and get them to start assigning some posts. I'm sure your employees would love a short respite from their current work to run some interesting stats.
I think one advantage of his test is that it's (apparently) independent of an entity with a stake in the outcome.
Based on everything I've seen about OkCupid, there's no shortage of integrity, but independent verification is still valuable.
Also, I'm curious: I've read a couple of articles online proposing different methods for OkCupid handling Mandatory answers to questions. One in particular involves treating Mandatory answers as only negative, so that agreeing with someone about the size of the sun (for example) doesn't mean you're a better match, it just means you're a worse match if you disagree. What are your thoughts on that? (Not the company's thoughts, of course.)
>I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.
I am curious: Are there any variables which, after you control for them, make this go away or diminish? i.e., high income, feminist leanings, political beliefs, etc. ?
no. men are on the whole, put off by sexually aggressive women, so women have evolved to use much more subtle forms of invitation.
The "message" is not the beginning of the story. The women selected her photos and wrote her profile, which was really her way of instating the process.
Basic human behavior is the women presents her availability, men respond with courtship rituals - that vary from culture to culture and the online culture is no different, but the basic pattern is the same.
Women, however, instigate the process with variables like the ones you mention (high income, feminist leanings etc) factored into her photos/profile. This is the same as in real life, for example, going out in SF is selecting for a certain type - you wont find many christian fundamentalist, creationist, poor people hanging out in the Marina. Again the woman has made the first move, but the next step is up to the guys to respond. So think of every okcupid profile as an opening message and you'll be closer to understanding the dynamics of dating.
I was going to leave a comment that this guy obviously doesn't read the blog. Then I noticed that the Trends blog (blog.okcupid.com) hasn't been updated in well over a year. What happened? It was an incredibly fascinating read.
Are you actually offering up an anonymized corpus of your data to play with? Not just because I have some questions I'd like to ask it, but because offering up some data the only way you could actually make that claim.
Absolutely, nothing in this experiment is news to anyone that knows about dating dynamics.
The experiment fails to account for the reason why people are on the site in the first place, it assumes the reasons are gender-agnostic, which is not the case.
Men join okcupid to get laid, sure there are some outliers, (usually the most vocal,) and some of them are genuine, but many claim that wasn't that motivation for reasons easily explained by cognitive dissonance.
Women join okcupid to get attention. Sure, a few are actually looking to find dates, but mostly, as my girlfriend says "okcupid is facebook for attention whores". For her, and any girl that grew up cute, she is used to getting a lot of attention, and this is just the online equivalent of wearing a miniskirt to a club. She loves it when guys spend ages writing creative messages, their fawning just plays right into her need for attention. She also loves the control, having the ability to just ignore someone who has spent so long trying to get her attention. okcupid addresses many human needs, but dating is very likely far down the list, past more involuntary needs.
just because the world has gone digital, doesn't mean human psychology changes. Women have been adorning themselves for attention since we first started painting in caves, and men, well, men are just men, it's why there are nearly 7 billion of us on the planet. there'd be 8B if it wasn't for the xbox.
The psychology of relationships really isn't that hard, it just seems like it when you're in one.
> perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them
I don't think this is quite true. In a bar or club women invite specific men to hit on them with positioning, proximity, and eye contact. She'll steal glances and stand nearby. The solid majority of flirting is subtley initiated by women in the real world and internet dating breaks that.
It hasn't been updated in over a year. Downer. Getting bought by match.com has clearly had an effect. I have the extremely dubious honour of having had my profile featured on there once as being of "average attractiveness". People still visit my profile to this day, despite me not used it in a few years. Now that's good long tail traffic.
Anecdotal evidence: all the girls I know on OkCupid have said that they are harassed the second they turn on the IM system, so they have it turned off. Not that it makes a huge difference- they get flooded with messages, varying from the inane ("hey baby, what's up?") to the creepy.
Given the sheer amount of crap they have to deal with, I don't think for a second that online dating is "easier" for women. Having to reject hundreds of suitors might sound preferable to having to approach tens, but I doubt that it really is.
if anything, I wish they would update the blog. News from some inside sources says that they are so over extended (running too lean?) that it takes them weeks to get new stuff started (that aren't in the pipe line).
There's a very interesting behavior that happens on the streets of Brazilian cities which your comment on anecdotal evidence made me remember. Due to a seemingly high percentage of men here acting like they've never seen a woman before in their life (ie, doing a quadruple-take when one walks by) and doing lots of cat-calling (generally in groups), women have learned to not make eye contact. Being that I'm not like these kinds of men, I still get treated like them thus women don't make eye contact with me, in passing.
I don't know if any of this strikes me as particularly new. Every new female account on any dating site gets absolutely hammered with messages in the first few hours.
What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city.
In Perth, Australia, for profiles above a 90% match to mine, there were 8 male profiles for every female profile.
For profiles averaging five stars, there were 8.5 male profiles for every female profile.
Supply and demand means that the females on the site can really hold out for more. I suspect that this means that the distribution of actual dating activity will be wildly uneven -- the 1% or 2% of males who are really very attractive will clean up almost the entire female pool's attention. And the 50% of females who are above average will have their pick of the top 25% of the male pool.
Perth is not necessarily a good sample, as this town already has a lopsided male:female ratio. But every city I looked at had the same phenomenon. If I turned attractiveness up to maximum and only went to high matches, males always greatly outnumbered females.
I've given consideration to setting up a dating website in a niche market, but that particular niche market will have an even more lopsided male-centric demographic. I've been seriously wondering about just letting men and women know up front what the current ratios are. The theory being that it will deter some men and encourage some women. Alternatively I might try bar tactics: men pay at the door, women drink for free. Again to deter male users and encourage female users.
Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.
"Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience."
Correction: There are more men using the site who happen to be similar to you than there are women. Filtering your pool to people with a 90%+ match percentage is like showing up at a comic book convention and saying "Damn, this city is a sausagefest!" There could simultaneously be lots of Perth women with stereotypically female tastes and interests complaining that those with 90%+ matches are all women.
For ccomparison, it would have been extremely interesting to host this experiment in Eastern European countries such as Russia. Due to alcoholism and many other issues, quality women there outnumber quality men and have to deal with competition that is much more alike that for men in the West.
As someone who lives in Eastern Europe (Belarus) and has been a heavy and analytical user of dating websites (in fact there is only one in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet) I can say this:
1. Your assumption is false (it's the same as saying "due to obesity and other problems in the US quality men outnumber quality women").
2. Your conclusion is definitely false. The situation is exactly the same as elsewhere: the demand from men is many times higher than the supply of women.
It would have been extremely interesting to host this experiment in Eastern European countries such as Russia. Due to alcoholism...
I can't speak for alcoholism here in Poland, but after moving to Warsaw from London, I was quite surprised at the number of young, single ladies. I've wondered if a seeming small difference in the age 15-64 sex ratio[1] of 0.99 vs 1.03 could be responsible, but really have no idea.
I just tried quick 15 minute search on Russian-language dating sites. Most of them show how many people of each sex have been online recently. Again there are much more men, at least twice the number of women.
Google also advertised me a site: "Meet men online. Want to marry a foreigner?"
For the reverse experience, try signing up a fake profile to Travel Girls (or any of the other similar sites). A new male profile will get pinged within minutes.
From a cursory scan of the online profiles, I'd say TG is a venue for both out-out and prostitution (search for profiles requesting "generous men only" and you'll see what I mean) whilst at the same time being a place for relatively well-off but friends-with-spare-time-or-money poor people to find travel partners (the stated goal of the site).
I have no idea what the breakdown between those two populations is though!
Easy: women can always get laid if the want to (not necessarily with whom they want to, but still). It's cheap for a man to try to pass on his genes by sleeping with a woman once. So why not give it a shot, even if the woman is not that attractive? On the other hand, for a woman it is very costly to pass on her genes.
That explains why men are more actively looking for casual partners, but there should still be women looking for long term partners (in fact there should be even more than men).
If there are fewer women than men on dating sites, that just shows that online dating is biased towards the casual.
I dunno why you're bringing lesbians into this. My point with feminism is that feminism is about treating women with with respect, and not expecting them to do thing, nor critizing their appearance all the time (too fat, too skinny, not enough make up, etc.) This could explain why some women do not like online dating.
Is this any worse in online dating than in real life dating?
If anything, women seem to benefit from sexism in online dating - they take advantage of the fact that men are expected to initiate by rarely doing so themselves. It's much easier and faster to sit back and read personalized messages than to write them.
>The fact that the first stage of online dating is so heavily stacked in women’s favour doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any easier for them, compared to men, to reach the end goal of pure love or perfect sex.
Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game. This conclusion seems like a white lie the author created for women.
No one is looking for perfect mate. Both men and women choose their partners from whoever is available. If women got 20 times more messages than men do, then women's pool of mates to select is 20 times larger than that of men.
And even if some people happen to hold the notion of perfect mate, women still has a better chance of finding the perfect mate than men do.
With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.
Of course, men have it harder than women in the mating game.
I think this is a myth. I wish years ago someone had told me all I needed to do was walk up to someone I found attractive and say "Hi, my name's Tom, how're you?" The day I started doing so, my dating life was revolutionised.
Actually, this applies to most situations: parties; conferences; seeing a new face at work.
With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.
Again, I disagree; just like hiring someone, how do you sort through the cruft to find the jewel in X number of applications? I'm not talking about seeking perfection, just someone whose quirks - and we all have them - you can tolerate enough to enjoy a successful relationship.
I'd be interested to know your race and your height.
At the end of the day, women still have deal breakers regardless of your personality, boldness, income, skills, etc.
The reason why I think women have it easier is that they can both wait for someone to approach AND take the initiative and go up to a guy if they so choose. Whereas guys not named Ryan Gosling almost always must take the initiative.
I'd be interested to know your race and your height.
Pasty white with a beer gut that shrinks and grows according to the season, and somewhere around 5'10" or 5'11".
At the end of the day, women still have deal breakers regardless of your personality, boldness, income, skills, etc.
Are you saying that men don't? I think it's fair to say that everyone has deal breakers. Personally, I'm put off by people who judge others according to their income - or lack thereof.
The reason why I think women have it easier is that they can both wait for someone to approach AND take the initiative
You're right in that women are approached by guys far more often than the other way around. Given the number of unhappily single women out there though, sitting back and hoping doesn't seem to be a successful strategy.
In terms of race, you have your choice of white women PLUS higher probability of success with other races (based on inter-racial marriages rates, OKCupid stats).
Then with height, you are about average, which is a good thing. You have your pick of women who are short or average height.
I realize everyone has deal-breakers but height and to some extent race for women are almost universal. It is extremely rare that a taller women will marry a shorter guy. I've travelled around the world many times, and count the one and only time I've seen a tall woman (6 ft) go out with a short guy (< 5'8): once in New York City. And statistically, white women are the least likely to date outside of their race.
Though I don't see how choosing a person based on their income is any less 'offensive' than visual superficialities. At least the former is somewhat based on merit. The fact that I worked my tail off in university and on the side to build up my skills so that I could earn a great living should be more of an attraction than say the fact that I inherited certain genes from my parents.
"The fact that I worked my tail off in university and on the side to build up my skills so that I could earn a great living should be more of an attraction than say the fact that I inherited certain genes from my parents."
if only that were true - good genes almost always trumph hardworking mentality. Wealth can trumphs genes (but only if its vast amounts). In other words, good looks (which is an indication of good genes, not just good clothes etc), is highly desired. And rightly so, for the biological requirement of reproduction demands such selection.
It's been proven that the algorithm is optimal for the initiators of proposals, i.e. men in contemporary Western culture, although women can hack this by asking guys out themselves.
The confusion is because you've artificially restricted the universe to a subset of its true size. Women's pool of mates to select from isn't 20 times larger than men, because men have already done a round of selection in deciding who to message. You don't actually message every single girl you see on OKCupid, do you? If you're fat or ugly as a woman, you're basically screwed (or rather, not screwed) in the mating game, because you become invisible to most men.
That's why I tell girls on the OKCupid Reddit that messaging guys can only help them. Once in a blue moon (as in once every month or two), I get an unsolicited message on OKC. A majority of the time, I don't reply. The thing is, I would never have messaged these girls to begin with, while occasionally I'll take a chance on a first date if their personality seems interesting, so they've only helped themselves.
It's also worth remembering that there are subsequent rounds of selection too. If women receive (on average) 20x more messages than men, it must mean that men send (on average) 20x more messages than women, since each message has exactly one sender and recipient. They're only going to end up with one girlfriend. So if those girls respond to their favorite guys, many of them will be culled out after the first date, third date, whenever. I've been on I think 16 first dates off OKCupid. I asked only about 3 of them out for a second date. Some (several?) of the remaining 13 probably were not interested in me anyway, but that's still a sizeable number of girls who did not get who they want.
Problem is that the stable marriage problem assumes that the number of women and men are the same which is clearly not the case for online dating. So yes the women's pool is larger by the fact there are more men on the site. Some of your assumptions are faulty. Just because a woman receives 20x more messages then men, doesn't mean men are sending 20x more messages. Say there are 5x more men on the site to begin with, then they are only sending 4x more messages.
I agree with your theory that women messaging men doesn't hurt but helps their chances.
You are misinterpreting the stable marriage problem. Among other things, the stable marriage algorithm guarantees that at each discrete time instant, each man and each woman is engaged to someone.
No, but rounding gender distribution off to 50/50 and assuming that polygamists are a rounding error, there are an equal amount of male and female singles. Or did I miss your point?
In a real life discrete time instant (e.g., an evening at the bar), most women will choose to go home alone rather than accept a second best partner. In the stable marriage algorithm, not a single woman will.
I.e., the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality.
But the case at hand wasn't talking about a time span that short, either. When you look at it in the long run, I'd say that both men and women have an equal likelihood of selecting a mate who is not the optimum for all qualities they look for. (i.e., to use less Greenspan-eque language, that I think that both men and woman will in the end "settle" for someone if they can't find someone who they'd consider "perfect" rather than remain alone).
However, come to think of it, I guess a prerequisite would be that there are an equal amount of men and women in the pool; which I think is so, I seem to remember from one of the okcupid analysis posts that the majority of profiles are male. Then again, on the whole, there are roughly the same amount of both, so I'm not so sure about your statement that "the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality"; maybe for dating sites, but on the whole?
Stable marriage problem doesn't say anything about how receiving more message is actually a bad thing and hurts the chance. Or you'd have to show me how receiving 20 messages is same as receiving 1 message.
Not necessarily. You're assuming the only difference between the women and the men is relative numbers. Let's say 15 women are on a dating website and 30 men. Taken in and of itself, this sounds great for women.
But the distribution of objectives matter. Let's say 13 of the women are looking long-term committed relationships and 2 are looking for something casual. This is a gross oversimplification but bear with me. If 25 men are looking for something more casual and 5 are in it for something more long-term, all of the sudden you have a system with 45 people where only 7 of them "have it easy" if you go by numbers - 2 of whom are women.
Now these aren't real figures but anecdotally I would say I'm in the right ballpark. At any rate, it sufficiently illustrates that "easiness" has nothing to do with relative size of the gender pools.
I understand where you are coming from. In a game as complex as dating with so many variables, you can easily come up with many situations where the general rule doesn't follow. However, on average, there are some obvious conclusions one can draw.
It's far from obvious to me that men have it harder than women - going by traditional gender roles, men can select from the set of women, women can select only from the subset of men who messaged them. Can you elaborate on your definitions and assumptions that lead to your intuition?
Whenever there's an experiment, we have to weigh the costs against the benefits.
Benefits here seem slight - we relearn that women, and pretty women in particular, get more messages than men.
Costs are non-trivial - about 1000 people deceived. Admittedly a minor deception, but experimental subjects normally get some protection, and a minute of time wasted by each translates to 16 hours overall. I'm presuming he got consent to use all the photos in his experiment and on the site, but he's silent on that. At least we have a thousand small disappointments.
Experiments involving deceiving people can be useful (e.g. ones investigating whether employers / landlords discriminate), but this one doesn't seem to rise to that level.
In other news, gay people don't even exist. Seriously, if you are going to attempt this type of "study" gay people are a perfect group, as you can mostly control for gender bias.
Exactly. I was reading this, and had the inbult assumption that all men like women and all women like men.
Way to erase a minority.
It also slightly feeds into the idea that "women have it easy!". I'd be interested if a straight female were to conduct a similar experiement and write it up. What would her perspectives be?
Well, yes, you can control for gender bias, but then you're studying a completely different domain. You're selling short the unique complexities of both heterosexual and homosexual courtship.
It's an interesting question: what determines how many messages a gay guy receives? What type of guys are most likely to send the initial message?
In the first four months I was on OKCupid, I got unsolicited messages from about 115 guys. In the same period, I sent unsolicited messages to about 10 guys, of which 7 elicited responses. My sense is that my numbers are higher than if I were a straight guy, but I have no idea how they compare to "typical" for gay guys.
I'm a straight guy, but I've had a lot of experiences observing how some of my gay male friends are able to date online and offline.
From what I've casually observed (which lines up with your guess) is that it is relatively easier for gay men to find others to meet/hookup with on almost any website (OkCupid, Grinder, Manhunt, etc) and also in real life.
One of my friends, who was not exceptionally attractive, witty or any other specific characteristic (let's say he's a 5/10) was able to get guys over to his apartment using Manhunt faster than I was able to get a pizza delivered. Not exaggerating a bit.
I have to wonder however, if the primary thing here is that its more equal 2-way attention. Men are actively looking for men, and men are actively looking for me. Whereas for heterosexual relationships it appears to be men looking for women, and women not looking for men.
If I remember right, OkCupid did some stuff on non-heterosexual relationships and it was interesting. I'll have to dig for that.
I then herded our collection of fake people...to five different US cities, where they would be allocated in pairs. The best looking man and woman in one city, second best boy and girl in another, and so on.
So the control is lost, even though care was taken to give them similar usernames.
In my experience OkCupid is drastically different in different cities. I feel that the attractiveness scale is completely useless when the profile gender pairs were seeded into different cities.
I actually stopped reading at that point though, so perhaps there was more to learn, but that was kind of an ender for me.
Because of the matching system, two profiles with identical answers would have shown up identically ranked, therefore obvious to any searchers. So they would have been flagged.
And any variation in answers or questions answered would have matched different personalities, throwing off stats.
It's also because most men believe that they have no chance with a 9 or a 10. Why bother messaging someone who they believe is vastly out of their league?
Some men are great at hacking the system and ignoring a woman's physical attractiveness, thus scoring really desirable mates. Others instead implicitly follow the rules of thumb that psychology discovered a while ago, according to which an attractive person is much more likely to be with another attractive person.
Most men stop contacting the most attractive female profiles because they never hear back, and the effort required to make a message that stands out - i.e. is original and interesting - does not justify the very low chance that there will be any response.
This might be the case sometimes; in this case the best-looking one isn't in the unattainably-beautiful class though. Her nose is kinda big.
In this case I think it just indicates that the initial judges did a poor job of judging who the most attractive one was. Or perhaps that the black and white picture used by the most attractive woman is a turn-off.
As for the "most attractive" man, he has a nice smile and nice eyes but his baldness and undefinable ethnicity might be a turnoff for the average woman.
I think the judges probably voted by looking at actual pictures, where most male selection probably happens at the thumbnail level. I'd argue the second best has a thumbnail that would garner more attention, from color if nothing else.
"If they are hot, the girls can pick and choose which men they interact with."
There was a video on Youtube on dating and game theory where 5 women and 5 men were given a number which corresponded to their attractiveness. Basically, those who were 5's, when accepted into the 8's group were made more attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex, even if they were still 5's physically. Conversely, those who were 10's got the pick of the litter and had to do the least work to find a mate.
It may be an artifact of the different city problem in data collection, but assuming it wasn't, I find it interesting that the woman who was 'second most attractive' got significantly more messages than the 'most attractive'. To me this suggests interesting game theoretical stuff going on here. Does anyone know any good research/math on strategies that would optimize for this phenomenon?
e.g. I can see a thought process happening along the lines of "she is too good looking for me, I won't try, rejection sucks. I'll try this slightly less attractive woman who probably isn't hit up as often because my chances will be better, because everyone is hitting up the really good looking woman". Of course if most men follow this, you get the discrepancy I noted.
Problem is that the profiles in the same city would all show up as similar users with similar names and with the profiles matching exactly. People would easily tell that they are fake and not send any message.
I coud have saved you a lot of trouble. Your results confirm what all dating web sites have always known, and which we've made no secret about: Nearly all initial messages are sent by men.
This does not mean that the site is "better" for women than for men, relative to any other form of heterosexual courtship. It's a deeply ingrained cultural, and perhaps biological, norm that men make proposals and the women evaluate them. If you went to a singles bar, you'd find that all drinks bought for strangers were purchased by men for women.
As others have pointed out, the choice of different cities interferes with what you were trying to demonstrate, though the effect size was so huge it was difficult to not confirm it despite the confounding factor.