Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Sunday, July 22 2012 @ 12:31 pm
Last modified on
Not a day goes by that I don't mourn the loss of OkCupid's fabulous, informative, fascinating, controversial Labs posts. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration...but I do miss the crazy questions, bright infographics, and provocative food-for-thought they provided.
The days of those posts may be long gone, but thankfully an amateur data analyst named Jon Millward has performed an experiment that picked up where OkCupid left off. He called the project "OkCupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons[*1] ," and decided to test the widely-held theory that women have it easier than men in the online dating world.
Millward put the theory to the test by making ten fake profiles and observing the responses he received to each, based purely off superficial notions of "attractiveness." To choose which ten pictures would participate in the experiment, Millward polled three separate people who rated the attractiveness of the pictures by what they thought members of OkCupid were most likely to be attracted to.
It turns out they were pretty good judges. Within 24 hours of the profiles being online:
Seven days into the experiment, Millward found the following results:
And just in case you want to write off his results as a fluke, Millward expanded the project to England and replicated the experiment. His findings were exactly the same: the two most attractive women received 83% of all messages. The most popular woman's inbox filled at 2 months, 13 days - but it would take 2.3 years for the most popular man's inbox to max out.
If attracting attention is the goal, then yes - Millward's experiment has shown a bias in favor of women on dating sites. But that also comes with a downside: the wider selection capabilities means a signal to noise ratio that makes the selection process a nearly-insurmountable challenge.
Men on dating sites face challenges of their own, largely due to the extreme competition from other male members. The best way for men to stand out online is to write unique, intriguing messages, which Millward suggests doing by:
Conclusion: men may have it a little harder than women, but if all it takes to bridge that gap is write more thoughtful messages, guys don't have it so bad after all.
To find out more about the dating site mentioned you can read our OkCupid review.