On Tinder, male profiles were liked far less often than female profiles

In a Tinder experiment using curated stock profiles, male profiles matched on just 0.6 per cent of the users they liked while female profiles matched at 10.5 per cent — a roughly seventeen-fold gap, with nearly all matches coming from men.

The number

In a controlled Tinder study that ran curated stock profiles, male profiles matched with only 0.6% of the users they liked, while equivalent female profiles reached a 10.5% match rate — a roughly seventeen-fold gap, and nearly all matches received by any profile came from men. ^[1]

What it does and doesn't establish

The figure documents a real, well-replicated asymmetry in swipe-app attention: on Tinder, male like-to-match rates are a small fraction of women's. It does not prove that women only pursue the top 20 per cent of men — the study's own authors attribute the skew to a platform feedback loop, in which men like indiscriminately and women turn selective in response, rather than to a fixed law of attraction, and it says nothing about who people actually partner with off the apps. For why this swipe gap is misused as an all-encompassing dating "law", see Is the 80/20 rule of dating true?

Sources

1 source · all archived at publication

[1]A First Look at User Activity on Tinder · arXiv (published at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016) · 2016 archived ↗

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