Apps like Tinder are a symptom of gender imbalance in the dating market

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/26/hookup-culture-isnt-the-problem-facing-singles-today-its-math/

by walterbell • 11 years ago

88 82 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

wskinner• 11 years ago

This is good, but it really just skims the surface. Something these articles tend to miss is that sexual commodification doesn't necessarily favor men. On Tinder, it probably favors women. For a more in-depth explanation of why, see http://worst-online-dater.tumblr.com/post/114619524524/tinde...

superuser2• 11 years ago

This is dressed up as a scientific paper, but Tumblr is not exactly a peer-reviewed journal, nor does this guy appear to be a formally trained scientist. Would be interesting to see similar analysis from a more credible source.

ousta• 11 years ago

yeah scientist or no the data will always favor the common consensual belief of modern western world or if not they won't even talk about it. no need to be "trained" scientist to do science.

lqdc136• 11 years ago

I guess I really don't get it. Why do women use Tinder when they could be using OkCupid?

It's literally 25-28% women and 72-75% men in the Bay Area. These are the numbers I got from scraping OkC profiles that had words in them. There are more college educated men than there are women. There are more masters+ graduated men than there are bachelor+ women.

Even in NYC, there is something like 60% men compared to 40% women (and I'm being generous here).

From anecdotal evidence, you are also much more likely to get a boyfriend as a girl than a hookup on OkCupid compared to Tinder.

I asked several girls why they use Tinder, and they basically tell me that it is because they think that by having an intercourse, they can get the guy to like them more, leading to an instant relationship. But why not just start with an instant relationship and not go through something you don't want to do?

nothrabannosir• 11 years ago

Maybe women and men are not as different as you think? Maybe women like hookups just as much as men do, and it's our environment (society, "norms", tv, the fact that "slut" is an insult, &c) that makes you think otherwise?

Asking women is not the answer here, because you still go through that societal filter. Besides, rarely does someone know what they want, in the first place.

"Ask a customer what they want, and they'll say they want a faster horse."

lqdc136• 11 years ago

The article makes an implicit assumption that girls don't want a fling and want marriage instead.

Then it argues that it is because the ratios are skewed.

I am arguing that the ratios are only skewed if they look in the places where the ratios are skewed.

It is possible that the assumption is not correct, but then the whole argument about the ratios being skewed makes no sense, because the "fling problem" disappears.

rmc• 11 years ago

Asking women is not the answer here

I'd add a big "but" here. There are pleanty of women who speak out and say that, yes, sometimes women just want a fling. Ask a woman who identifies as a feminist. They are usually less concerned with upholding traditional gender roles, and often can speak freerer.

However you're right that the societal filter can apply. If a conservative older, more powerful, man asks a woman (e.g. a 40 y.o. boss asking a 20 y.o. new employee), then yes, sometimes people don't tell the boss everything.

A general advise of "don't listen to women!" is very disturbing.

meric• 11 years ago

There's oxytocin effect after intercourse which literally helps to build the relationship between two intercourse partners, so they have a point.

detrino• 11 years ago

You assume women are just interested in getting "a boyfriend" rather than seeking a certain type of man.

benbristow• 11 years ago

Tinder's less effort than OKC.

With OKC you have you go through a whole set-up process and monitor it more like you would Facebook.

With Tinder you install, login with Facebook which pulls in all your photos/interest, swipe left + right, wait for a response, message and hope luck ever falls in your favour.

ucho• 11 years ago

OkCupid had many analyzes about demographics and activity of their users. This one was quite famous: http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...

tolmasky2• 11 years ago

Because OKCupid overwhelms you with worthless information. It provides you with all sorts of stats that don't matter: favorite movie (re: movies I think will attract the person I want), favorite music (re: what bands might impress the person i want?), ridiculous quizzes (not that different from fashion magazine quizzes). Presented with this deluge of useless data on your partner, you can then filter on these worthless parameters (because why not? you're getting a ton of messages anyways, might as well filter on something). Anyways, after you've successfully gotten the number down to something reasonable you proceed to... make your decision based almost entirely on a picture.

The actual important thing to realize about Tinder is that it maximizes the only metric that matters: face to face contact. Everyone on there is on the same page: lets get together and in 30 minutes we'll have a WAY better idea of whether we vibe than reading a glorified resume online and going back and forth trying to by witty (often to then find out we have no chemistry in person!). Ironically enough Tinder actually uses technology to rehumanize the dating experience: its always been about going out and meeting people, Tinder is a simple extension of that, OKCupid tried to replace it with a "compatibility score".

stouset• 11 years ago

This is half of it.

The other half is that many women enjoy looking for casual hookups, just as men do. Certainly this can be (and is) done on OkCupid, but on Tinder the cultural expectations are more tailored towards something short-term.

hkmurakami2• 11 years ago

Related: OkC heightens all participants' expectations of one another, which is counterproductive particularly in advance of even he first face to face encounter.

mcv5• 11 years ago

I disagree that OKCupid (and many similar sites) focus on useless statistics. I can tell more about what someone is like by their interests and their writing than by their face. Of course meeting in person is important, but it's also time consuming, and that's better spent on someone you might actually have something in common, than on some random person with a nice face.

welanes• 11 years ago

The main pull of Tinder for women, I thought, is that they get to decide who can talk to them.

OkCupid, POF etc is like a scene from World war Z - hoards of men pinging girls with messages constantly.

The downside is that Tinder requires less investment - most don't even enter a bio - and so things kick off with a match based on physical attraction rather than any other attribute. I call that a 'downside' but guess that's only true if your criteria for a partner extends beyond looks.

In which case there's OkCupid. So yeah I don't see the problem here. The optimal choice may be to install both apps and filter accordingly.

hkmurakami2• 11 years ago

Ironically, that had (previously) caused men to swipe right on everyone, putting the ball back in their court for selecting who to talk to once matches were made.

m12k2• 11 years ago

Tinder's swipe mechanic, while incredibly superficial, helps with the biggest problem with OkC and other traditional dating sites: The experience is horrible for women. Their inbox receives a torrent of marriage offers and incredibly explicit sex offers from men they have no interest in. Tinder's reciprocality system, where you both have to show interest before a chat is even possible, solves this elegantly. The downside IMO is that it's incredibly hard to find someone that you have more than a physical interest in. OkC's matchmaking questions and match% system is actually a really good solution to this. I think there's a business opportunity in combining the two - enforce the reciprocality like Tinder does, but have matchmaking questions, so it can try to pair you with more likely matches first. (OkC actually has a feature like this, but when they don't enforce its use, it's entirely meaningless). Of course this would begin compromising Tinder's other big advantage, the incredibly easy setup (it doesn't really _feel_ like making a dating profile, so it attracts a much wider audience) - but I think it'd be worth experimenting with nonetheless.

lqdc136• 11 years ago

OkC has (or had when I used the site) a quickmatch mechanic where it's essentially the same. If both sides match, both receive a message that they matched each other.

I guess all they could do is just filter all messages and only keep the quickmatch mechanic? Initially, they had something like that as well!

Basically a forced requirement that someone can set. Such as... you can only message me if this or that. One would be only if I first match you. They had more success when they got rid of that mechanic.

personlurking3• 11 years ago

I haven't used Tinder but I've watched as my friends use it. The other problem with these dating apps and sites is people like or are merely confused about what they want. For someone to positively answer the question "would you sleep with someone on the first date?" but then put that they want a long-term relationship - these things seem counter to each other, imho. Both sexes need to be able to say it straight out that they just want sex, then there needs to be a filter to remove these people for the LTR dating pool users. Instead it's "if I can have sex, then the LTR can wait til someone else comes along". That being said, there is a question on OKC that asks how long one would wait before having sex (ex, 3-5 dates, etc). They could make this question have much, much more weight.

mcv5• 11 years ago

Traditional dating sites can definitely be horrible for women. I think it'd help if you could autoblock anyone you haven't contacted. Or separate between a spam box and one for messages you're actually interested in.

krfsm• 11 years ago

As most people aren't unique snowflakes when it comes to mate preferences, the likelihood of being the only woman fancying a certain man is low. With Tinder women trade the obnoxious problem of heaps of unwanted attention for the less glaring but quite insidious problem of letting the eligible bachelors know exactly how well off they are. With OkCupid, these men play the same game as everybody else, just with more success. At Tinder they have an exact count of how in demand they are, giving less incentive to commit.

jules• 11 years ago

There is always a discrepancy between what people say they want and what their actions show they want.

notahacker• 11 years ago

Why do women use Tinder when they could be using OkCupid? It's literally 25-28% women and 72-75% men in the Bay Area. These are the numbers I got from scraping OkC profiles that had words in them.

What makes you think that (i)women don't frequently use both, if they're interested in online dating and (ii)the Tinder profiles aren't at least as skewed male-wards?

The simple fact is that men are generally more proactive in looking for dates/hookups and so are more likely to go to the effort of registering for a website to find members of the opposite sex to meet, so basically every dating website not created exclusively for lesbians is majority male. Also, as others have pointed out, Tinder's selling point is that women get to choose which proactive men actually get to talk to them, which saves the rudeness of having to ignore/block lots of men rather keener on the idea of an instant relationship than they are.

lqdc136• 11 years ago

Regarding where I'm getting the info:

https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/what-to-know-about-tinde...

62% of dating app users are men. This is actually much better than OkC. Also, Tinder has 2x more users in general:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F05rbwm%2C%20%...

maehwasu• 11 years ago

You can't just look at raw percentages without looking at their composition: how in-demand are the users on Tinder vs. the ones on OKCupid?

For guys with higher "market value", OKCupid is really a waste of time relative to Tinder, and so fewer of them will use OKC. That makes the 72-75% figure quite misleading, since a good deal of those men might not be considered particularly desirable.

mettamage2• 11 years ago

When looking at technology adoption, women prefer the mobile phone. Computers are still predominantly masculine and mobile phones due to their communicative nature a lot more feminine. That's what feminist academic literature I've read says anyways.

aikah• 11 years ago

The downside? Women frequently wind up being treated as sex objects

yet

but men generally must earn more in order to attract a wife

CmonDev4• 11 years ago

I have yet to see such an article without men-bashing.

dvt5• 11 years ago

Read the article earlier today and I just read it again because the first time I honestly didn't really get its point. After reading it a second time, here are my thoughts:

In the Vanity Fair article, David Buss, a University of Texas psychology professor, claimed that apps like Tinder contribute to “a perceived surplus of women,” among straight men, which in turn leads to more hookups and fewer traditional relationships. Here’s the thing: This surplus of women is not “perceived” at all but very, very real.

Okay, so according to Mr. Birger, we have we have a surplus of women. He fails to qualify it here, but later we realize this is true of only a few places (Manhattan, for example) and not necessarily true in the general case. In fact, women generally outnumber men in college[1].

As I note in my book, today’s lopsided gender ratios “add up to sexual nirvana for heterosexual men, but for heterosexual women — especially those who put a high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock — they represent a demographic time bomb.”

I don't really get this. It smells of thinly veiled anti-male sentiment ("sexual nirvana for heterosexual men") -- as if women don't enjoy casual sex? It also seems that Birger doesn't think relationship goals are discussed by both parties. Men aren't the only ones that "decide" where a relationship heads -- Vanity Fair disagrees, but I frankly think that's complete nonsense and does a disservice to young women. Furthermore, women aren't indentured -- they can leave an unfavorable relationship at any time. Specifically, the Vanity Fair article was referring to hookup culture. Presumably, if you want a long term relationship (and put a "high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock"), you won't meet someone on Tinder Friday and have sex with them on Saturday. Even a dating neophyte can tell you that much.

Regardless of orientation, obviously not all women place a premium on marriage, or even monogamy. But for the straight, college-educated woman who is eager to get married and start a family, the question becomes how best to deal with a dating market in which men have too much leverage.

Again, the Vanity Fair article specifically dealt with Tinder. You put a high premium on long term relationships and wedlock? Don't use Tinder. There's OKCupid, Match.com, eHarmony, and PoF; most of these are aimed towards relationship-building and not necessarily thrill-seeking. Tinder is primarily a hookup app. Kind of how the Silk Road was mainly used for buying and selling drugs. Sure, there are edge cases, but it's important to see the salient point here.

Unsurprisingly, men tend to be less — I’ll say it — promiscuous when women are more scarce.

This is a (stupid, and again, thinly-veiled anti-male) truism. Female scarcity by definition implies less male sex going on. Mr. Birger managed to say absolutely nothing while at the same time making it Tweet-worthy.

But really the article fails at a much more basic level. Some people are looking for relationships while others are looking for hook-ups. Without quantifying these two segments (and the cross-pollination between these groups), Birger's claims are meaningless. At least the Vanity Fair article didn't particularly try to make any sweeping generalization and was somewhat of a showpiece: an excellently written, wonderfully researched, and fun to read collection of interviews. Birger's, on the other hand, makes claims it can't possibly prove and reduces some of the most complex human social interaction to "leverage" and "priorities". I think he took the Vanity Fair article a bit too seriously.

Finally, the entire Birger article makes a huge assumption: that most women are interested in a "boyfriend" rather than a hookup. Without the data to back this assumption up, we're stuck in the middle of nowhere.

[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html

MrBuddyCasino• 11 years ago

Bullshit. Women use Tinder for sex, not to find a spouse. For some guys it seems hard to face the fact that many women just like sex, a lot. Source: several women I've talked to.

dvt5• 11 years ago

Bingo. Mr. Birger fails to see the salient point here. Everyone knows what Tinder is. It's a hookup app. Want a serious relationship? Don't use Tinder and don't sleep with someone 30 minutes into getting to know them.

tolmasky2• 11 years ago

This is an oversimplification of both men and women. THe truth is most people are looking for "I don't know" or "it depends", just like in real life. When most people see a girl and ask them out, it would be absurd to think it's as calculated as "for sure hookup" or "definitely to marry", it's just "this person seems worth getting to know". Tinder is one of the few apps that mirrors that reality by not asking you ridiculous things like "what are you looking for?" It changes all the time and will absolutely change for the right person. Same as in real life: plenty of long term relationships start in bars, and that's OK. We all go to bars, sometimes you meet the right person there. I am bewildered by why tinder is so hard to understand: it's essentially just a bar, a slightly better bar actually since you know everyone there is single.

halviti2• 11 years ago

I know several women that have used Tinder to get into serious relationships, as that was their goal from the beginning.

I'm sure the vast majority use it for hookups, but you can't generalize everyone.

KerrickStaley• 11 years ago

Bullshit. Different people come into Tinder with different expectations.

lqdc136• 11 years ago

What about "for sex to find a spouse"?

personlurking3• 11 years ago

Having lived in Brazil, this often happens there, though 'spouse' can just mean boyfriend in this case. The more I hear about hookup culture, the more I think the rest of the world is becoming like Brazil.

CmonDev4• 11 years ago

Sleeping on the first few dates makes a perfect spouse material.

konstruktor2• 11 years ago

On a meta level, I find it worth noting that you, as somebody who talks about women as "women" gets quite different, and seemingly more honest, answers from them than the other poster who calls them "girls". It's almost as if treating people with respect mattered.

soldergenie2• 11 years ago

People ask me why I, a software developer, don't move to Silicon Valley where salaries are high and venture capital is easy to get. The skewed male/female ratio of Silicon Valley is the reason. As an Asian-American male, I have a hard enough time getting a date. Going to the valley seems like the odds would be double stacked against me.

seren• 11 years ago

But according to the article, you should move to Manhattan.

soldergenie2• 11 years ago

That's what I did. And dating here is definately easier than (random medium sized American city). Of course, that might just come from being in a large metropolitan city. Silicon Valley might be the same - I've never lived there - but the male/female ratios indicate the odds aren't in my favor.

cm2187• 11 years ago

What I love is seeing the baby boom generation discovering with horror that their kids are sexually liberated. No facebook to remind them what they were doing in the 60s and 70s. Do as I say, not as I did when I was your age!

CmonDev4• 11 years ago

As long as sexually liberated people don't plan to marry less-sexually liberated people after age 30-35 - it's all good.

jevgeni4• 11 years ago

As I note in my book, today’s lopsided gender ratios “add up to sexual nirvana for heterosexual men, but for heterosexual women — especially those who put a high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock — they represent a demographic time bomb.”

What kind of sexist crap is this? The problem for men in such an environment, is that a lot of women start to accept the sex object treatment they get, and hence aren't really the people you would want to be with for a long term.

Generalising a gender as only driven by dumb sex is sexist, even if that gender is male.

omonra4• 11 years ago

Your being unhappy with a generalization as being 'sexist' is your own problem. The rest of the world just doesn't care that you feel this way.

If you want others to actually listen to your view and not dismiss as meaningless, you have to present data that contradict the premise you are contending - especially when your view flies in the face of anecdotal evidence all of us already possess.

jevgeni4• 11 years ago

What kind of /r/iamverysmart asshatery is this? I don't posses your anecdotal evidence. Especially, when you yourself don't even bother to illustrate them.

For bonus points, you could try and prove why one would need evidence in this particular case to prove that sweeping gender generalizations are sexist?

Al-Khwarizmi• 11 years ago

I guess it's because I am an European and the culture is really different in the US, but I find this article really... exotic.

Are the so-called "mixed-collar marriages" that uncommon in the US? Here it's a rather normal thing. It's true that many graduates end up with other graduates because they meet at university or at work, but I know a lot of those "mixed-collar marriages" and almost no one I know, except for one or two gold-diggers, thinks that people with more or less studies than them are outside their dating pool.

Also, the concept that women invariably want long-term relationships and marriages while men want to hook up is something that I associate with past generations. At least here, now it tends to be the opposite. In the vast majority of young couples I know, it's the man who wants to get serious and pushes for more commitment (living together, marriage and so on); while the woman wants to be free and keep things more informal...

usrusr3• 11 years ago

I'm german and I see the "no mixed collar marriages" idea everywhere. It's rare enough to see low-status academic (engineer, teacher) husband / high status academic (law, medicine) wife, even though it certainly happens. The opposite direction is certainly perfectly normal.

The perceived push for stability from the make partner is probably strongly related to traditional gender roles (at least here in Germany, a crazy stronghold of the housewife idea), which make the female partner correctly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously fear that she could lose her career in the process, while the male partner would at most risk money and a few years.

dogma11382• 11 years ago

Both of them are educated and it's hard to claim that engineering is a lower status than law for example. In the US "lower classes" won't have any higher education or a community/city college degree at best it is completely different due to the cost of education.

mcv5• 11 years ago

Engineer counts as low-status in Germany? That's certainly not something I would have expected.

But from what I understand, Germans are a lot more status-conscious than the surrounding countries, with more hierarchy, people often expecting to be addressed by their titles, bosses not wanting to be addressed by their first name, etc.

But I'm Dutch, and I know several men who work in construction, who are married to university-educated women. I don't know what degree my brother-in-law has, but he hasn't been to university, unlike my sister (though I wouldn't call him less educated; he educates himself). And since I never graduated, I'm technically also married to a woman with a higher degree (though her degree is lower than the one I would have had if I'd continued, so I consider myself higher educated than her until she gets that MBA).

So I'd say it's fairly common here.

dogma11382• 11 years ago

I don't know in which Europe you live but "mixed-collar" isn't any more common here. Firstly the "mixed-collar" marriages in the article refer to educated vs uneducated individuals, lower classes especially in the US are much less likely to achieve college or higher education, in Europe with few exceptions (cough UK cough) it's not an issue.

But in Europe it's going to be just the same the chances of some one with say graduate or doctoral degree being in a long term relationship some one without a similar degree is fairly low.

People meet at school at in work, they usually have social interactions with their peers, and most importantly educated people prefer to date other educated people because they are more likely to share interests, world views, and could hold a conversation with each other.

And as far as true "collar" difference goes than you need only too look at old money families all those "new age aristocrats" while they might "sleep around with the help" they usually don't mix with others especially in countries where familial history is very important like the UK.

cafard• 11 years ago

In my neighborhood there is a carpenter married to a pediatrician, but I have a hard time coming up with more examples. Degrees don't seem to me to mean that much here (the US), unless one knows the school and sometimes the program. Having said that, there is a profound snobbery one finds here and there against the degree-less.

I have been out of the dating market for almost three decades, so I can't tell you. A friend did say that young women he knew regarded marriage as a system of control they didn't care for; but he is my age and I don't know how big his sample is.

mcv5• 11 years ago

Europe is a big place. The above may be more true in northern Europe than in southern Europe, I suspect. With many exceptions. Though I certainly recognize this.

kristofferR• 11 years ago

This article perpetuates the damaging (for both genders) traditional sexist notion that women really don't like sex and that men are the sex freaks.

Women like and think about sex just as much as men, but it's unfortunately still not socially acceptable to believe that. The women on Tinder treat the guys there just as much as potential "sex objects" (whatever that is supposed to mean) as the guys do with the women. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The hookup culture/Tinder may suck for the people who want serious monogamous relationships with marriage and children (although I disagree with the premise, I think Tinder makes those kinds of relationships easier to initiate too, but I digress..), but to make it seem like it's bad for women is absurd.

Women like sex and men like relationships. Women who have casual sex aren't victims, just like men in relationships aren't victims.

usrusr3• 11 years ago

(Something I mis-posted elsewhere, in different wording) :

The mechanism described by the article is quite simple: for women as a group, achieving equal or better education/career while at the same time insisting on only considering a spouse of equal or better education/career just isn't sustainable. The failure mode turns out to include easy sex for a few lucky guys. Not exactly what feminism had in mind.

What the article completely ignores: it also means even less females for males of the low education/career range, who were already hard pressed by "marrying up" alone. This kind of gender imbalance is often comes with violence and is therefore a much bigger problem than some prudish outcry over sinful tinder.

Hopes should go towards self-correction in the shape of considerable erosion of the "marrying down" taboo. Once that happens, the observed disbalance will have been just a temporary fluctuation on the road to greater equality.

MichaelMartens• 11 years ago

That's true. The imbalance in dating apps are huge. Women are getting messages daily and they are just overwhelmed. Therefore I would suggest you guys to quit this "attention festival" and focus on approaching women in real life. It's really not so difficult to learn it. If you would like to know how to do this - read my post here: http://bestdatingproductreviews.com/make-women-want-you-revi...

Apps like Tinder are a symptom of gender imbalance in the dating market

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