Tyson et al. 2016 — A first look at user activity on Tinder

What the study found

Tyson and colleagues created a set of curated "stock" profiles on Tinder and measured how they performed. They recorded a pronounced gender asymmetry: male profiles matched with only a tiny fraction of the users they liked, whereas female profiles matched at a far higher rate, and almost all of the matches any profile received came from male users. ^[1]

male stock profiles matched with only 0.6 per cent of the users they liked while female profiles attained a 10.5 per cent matching rate

^[1]

The authors describe a resulting feedback loop, in which men are pushed to be less selective in the hope of getting any match while women can afford to be more selective; in the study's survey, 63 per cent of women estimated that over half of the profiles they liked resulted in a match. ^[1]

Why it matters here

This paper is often invoked in manosphere discussions of a supposed "80/20 rule", where a small share of men are said to receive the overwhelming majority of interest online. The study does document a large gap in match rates by gender on one platform using artificial profiles, which is why it appears in debates over is the 80/20 rule of dating true?. At the same time, its numbers describe swipe-and-match behaviour with curated profiles rather than real-world relationship outcomes, so how far the figures generalise is part of what the claim page weighs.