date_mining

Dating and Racism?

2010-08-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

In his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 Barak Obama inspired many by saying : "There is no black America, there is no white America or Latino America, there is the United States of America". Utopia? or maybe was he hoping that his two little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character?

At SpeedDate.com, we had a unique opportunity to study how the color of the skin influences dating behaviors. Gender, ethnicity, age or location are important factors that will highly correlate with certain dating patterns that some might call racism. Preferring to date people of a specific ethnicity can simply be a matter of taste but when this ethnicity is systematically your own it can be perceived as a sign of racism.

This study is based on dating preferences of a few million members from online dating site SpeedDate.com.

Do Men "Discriminate" more than Women?

No, "same race" preference is significantly more frequent with women. A majority (53%) of women prefer to date men of their own ethnicity while less than half (42%) of male members demonstrate a similar behavior.

Minorities are Often the Victims of Racism. Does that make Them Less Likely to Be Influenced by Race While Dating?

The chart above shows that minorities like black or latinos are typically more open to dating other ethnicities. The opposite is true for caucasians, more than 50% of white members prefer to date members of the same ethnic group. What is more surprising (at least to me) is this stronger "racist" tendency in asian people and by racist I only mean that they prefer dating members of the same ethnicity. What is even more intriguing is that for all ethnicities except for Asians, women show a stronger preference for the same race. For Asians the behavior is reversed meaning a large majority of men (60+%) prefer same race dating while it's true for less than half of the asian women members. I would love to hear why you think that is.

Does Preference for Same Race Dating Get Stronger With Age?

Arguably older people lived in a more racist world. This could imply that race weigh more in their dating preferences. The data shows some surprising behavior (at least to me). As shown in the graph below the trend for females is pretty strong. In their 20s less than half chose to date in the same ethnic group, this ratio goes up to 70% by the time they reach 60. The trend is opposite for men. Only 40% of senior men prefer same race dating to compare to 70% for women. The difference is staggering (at least to me). I would love to read your interpretation.

Another Unique Pattern for Asian Dating Preferences.

In the chart below I compared White vs Asian women race preferences and how it trends with age. This diagram shows another Asian specificity... older Asian women seem to open up to other ethnicities as they get older. I guess it's never too late for an "exotic" romance.

What is a little disappointing (at least to me) but worth pointing out, is how racially driven white women become in their 50s. At this age, 7 out of 10 white women chose to exclusively date caucasians.

What Ethnicities Are The Most Compatible?

I first looked at "supply and demand" of ethnicities trying to come up with a popularity ranking by race. Popularity being defined as follow : how often an ethnicity is chosen as a preference relative to the "supply" of ethnicities in our members' database. I decided not to publish or share this data, worried that this could be misused, mis-interpreted and as a result offend some readers.

Instead, I'm sharing what I believe ot be an interesting relationship diagram on ethnic compatibility derived from this dataset. This "race network diagram" is based on reciprocal intent, meaning on what members said they prefer not on who they actually dated.

The color of the skin still plays an important role in dating preferences. Younger generations however, are less influenced by ethnicity. This is a hopeful indication that race will become less of a "discriminant" over time.

In The Search For "Cougar Town"

2010-07-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

When Does a Woman Become a "Cougar"?

Abc is airing a new show called cougar town. The show stars former friends star Courtney Cox as a recently divorced single mother back on the dating scene. When the show started airing, Courtney was in her late 40s. According to The Urban Dictionary, a common definition of "cougar" in this context is : "An older woman who frequents clubs in order to score with a younger man". This behavior that seems to become more popular amongst celebrities but is that true for common daters.

To better understand at what age women are more likely to prefer younger man, I pulled a new data-set of 100k online dates from online speed-dating site SpeedDate.com. The data has been anonymised for privacy reasons. What I consider to be valid online speedDates are chat sessions where both parties typed at least one time. This establishes the intent to date. In the graph below you can visualize the average age difference (between the two participant in the speed-date) and how it trends as women get older. The Y axis represents the average age difference between the male and the female, the X axis the age of the women participant. 40 is the age when women start preferring younger men and the average age difference continues to increase linearly as women get older.

Where Are Men More likely to Date Older Women?

Below a heat map of numbers of cougars relative to all members. Men are more likely to date older Women in Nebraska or North Dakota than anywhere else in the US. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

When Do Women Go On the Prowl?

2010-06-11T17:01:00.001-07:00

A Deeper Look at Who breaks the Ice in a Blind Date.
In our society it is still thought by many that “the man makes the first move” and recent data from SpeedDate confirms it, most of the time...

Based on a recent data-set of a hundred thousand dates, we, at SpeedDate, found that in 78% of the dates, the male initiated the conversation. The sample reflects dates from SpeedDate users from around the world.

We did however found that this wasn't case for 22% of the dates? So who are these women? In the graph below you can see the break down by age and gender for “who typed first”.

The data shows behavior is not consistent and does change significantly for women over the age of 40. Perhaps the most surprising find is that after the age 60, women break the ice more frequently then men!

Another surprising observation stemming from the data is that women in their 20s are also more like to engage first.

Thanks to SpeedDate.com for the data.

SpeedDate.com

2010-06-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

A few words about SpeedDate.com, the source of my data and where I was VP of Engineering. www.SpeedDate.com is an online dating site.

How is speedDate different from the other match.com and Eharmony?

Think of wine tasting. You can try to buy wine based on a few attributes : dry, sweet, carbernet, red, white, Chablis etc... but you'll never know if you like the wine until you actually taste it. Match.com will let you browse and search members based on their long and boring profile criteria. Eharmony tries to find the perfect match based on a long and tedious questionnaire that feels a like a therapy website.

SpeedDate on the other hand simply let you "taste" the wine right before you buy it! How? By letting you go on an online realtime 3 minute date (using chat or video conference), for free.