Tinder, which the N ew York Times estimated to have upwards of 50 million active users, said that while men spend 7. Contact us at letters time. Newsfeed Dating More Men Use Dating Apps Than Women. Getty Images. By Laura Stampler. February 17, AM EST. More Must-Read Stories From TIME. You May Also Like. Here's Proof That Everyone Will Be Online Dating This Valentine's Day. America Needs to Get Back to Facts. Paywall-Icons-Devices Unlimited access to TIME.

Paywall-Icons-Newsletter Inside TIME newsletter, twice weekly. Leagues do seem to exist. In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are. Bruch would know. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January Imagine for a second that you are one of the users Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a very desirable user.

Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.

The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.

Michael Rosenfeld , a professor of sociology at Stanford University who was not connected to this study, agreed that persistence was a good strategy. Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge.

White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower. Bruch said that race and gender stereotypes often get mixed up, with a race acquiring gendered connotations. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy. Especially in New York.

Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them.

Online dating, for all its faults and critiques, has become one of the most popular ways Americans find love. One awesome side effect of this is that we now have access to a realm of data that has never been available before — how people talk, interact, and communicate prior to entering a relationship. And one thing that should be worrisome for straight men is the size of their disadvantage in the market.

Josh Fischer is the Director of Product Insights at SNAP Interactive STVI: OTC BB , the company that owns the dating website Are You Interested. com has 20 million members, and Josh sent over some fascinating charts that look at the probability women and men respond to messages given the ages of a sender. Basically, everyone is more likely to respond to a message from someone younger than they are from someone older.

Here's the probability a woman responds to a message from a man on AYI. The vertical access is the probability of response, and the horizontal axis shows the age difference. The younger the man is, relative to the woman, the better shot he has. And here's the probability a man responding to a message from a woman. Note that the response rates across all age differences are way higher.

What does this mean? Generally speaking, an average straight man will have to send 25 messages to women his own age procure one response, while the average straight woman will have to send 5 messages. That's fascinating, and also could be an explanation — men sending a lot more messages than women — for the disparity. Keep reading. US Markets Loading H M S In the news.

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That's fascinating, and also could be an explanation — men sending a lot more messages than women — for the disparity. Already a print subscriber? Quick Links. Stay up to date with what you want to know. No word on the percentage of Tinder-loving bros who take selfies with babies or tigers. Email Link icon An image of a chain link. The vertical access is the probability of response, and the horizontal axis shows the age difference.

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