How dating is much harder for men
This article is a segment of a larger article
As Norah Vincent experienced first hand when she pretended to be a man, it is very difficult for a man to approach a woman he’s romanticly interested in. Even though it’s still expected of men to make a first move, women tend to have very little patience and tolerance for men who try to approach them, regardless of how nice and respectful the man tries to me. As such, it requires a lot confidence for the average man to approach a woman and persist in the face of constant rejection, resulting in many men simply giving up.
While men who fail in the real life dating marketplace often used to have more success in online dating, the tides have turned in the age of social media, and today online dating is extremely stacked against men. In “Tinder Experiments II”, the anonymous author notes :
It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. The Gini coefficient for the Tinder economy based on “like” percentages was calculated to be 0.58. This means that the Tinder economy has more inequality than 95.1% of all the world’s national economies. In addition, it was determined that a man of average attractiveness would be “liked” by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder.
In Business Insider, author Walt Hickey argues :
We know, from the chart above, that a woman who sends a message to a man her own age has a 17.5% likelihood of receiving a response to that message. We know that a man who sends a message to a woman his own age has a 4% likelihood of receiving a response to that message.
[…]
An average man who sends 18 messages to women his own age can be 50% certain he’ll receive at least one response. For women, they need to send only 5 messages to be 50% certain they’ll get a response.
Looking at higher confidence levels, if a woman wants to be 90% certain she’ll receive a response from a man her own age, she’ll have to send 13 messages. A man will have to send 58 messages.
Finally, to be 99% certain she’ll receive a response, a woman must send 25 messages to men her own age.
A man will have to send 114 .
This leads us to believe that one potential cause of the disparity between the male response rate and female response rate is the system itself. If men must spam women with messages in order to elicit a response, then women will be more selective when responding to the surplus in general. Since women are understandably disinclined to respond to all the messages, men must send out more in order to guarantee any response. It’s cyclic.