Most Data Is Normal: Dating Is Anything But
nature is cruel; statistics is worse
The online dating giant OkCupid runs a blog here on Medium. Every now and then they put out something really fantastic, like this archived article from 2014 that highlighted some fascinating discrepancies on the battlefield of love.
It turned some heads and generated some delightfully disruptive graphs, and has since been deleted — probably because peering at the truth underneath oceans of data tends to be somewhat unpleasant.
You could, of course, argue that OkCupid’s data is biased or this interpretation is skewed. The dating app Hinge put out an analytics article in 2017, which reached quite similar conclusions.
One interesting quote compares ‘likes’ received by users to wealth distribution in economies:
It turns out that, as it pertains to incoming likes, straight females on Hinge show a Gini index of 0.376, and for straight males it’s 0.542.
On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average — think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war — think South Africa).
