Net dating: fussy women
By Techgirl

American dating/marriage website OkCupid has a young, educated and progressive membership.  Their membership reflects the modern, multi cultural America with White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Indian singles who have signed up.

While there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Indians, single men and women in both the countries have much in common. More so in this networked world. Especially so in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore and even Delhi.

We women (including some of my girlfriends) feel that many men are superficial and mainly go for ‘looks’. But it seems that women may be guiltier of such superficial beliefs.
 
OkCupid has just surveyed its members and found that it is ‘women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.’

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No matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.

Our research shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.

As you can see in the charts on our blog, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

Just to illustrate that women are operating on a very different scale, here are just a few of the many, many guys we here in the office think are totally decent-looking, but that women have rated, in their occult way, as significantly less attractive than so-called “medium”:

Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems its women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex.
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The full OKCupid blog post is recommended reading.  Perhaps OkCupid should now research what value women place to how much the guy earns.

(Techgoss had published the following article on Oct 8, 2009)

Indian men Dateless in America
By Techgirl

It was hard enough to understand the language of love in the real world, and it becomes harder still on the internet.  A guy may present himself as Shahrukh and he may turn out to be Shakti Kapoor. In America, sites like Match.com, eHarmony, PlentyofFish and OkCupid are very popular. An online survey is showing Indian men don’t have much luck on these sites.

American dating/marriage website OkCupid has a young, educated and progressive membership.  Their survey of 500,000 contacts between White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Indian people on the site reveals that Indian men have low acceptance rates on the site.

According to OkCupid,  their number crunching shows that if men and women belong to the same race/country the general ‘reply’ rate to any contact is 27 percent.  But for Indian men making contact with Indian women it is only 18 percent. Indian male contact to Black women has a reply rate of 34 percent.  Only 20 percent of white women bother to reply. Why are Indian men online so unpopular?

Indian women in America have better prospects.  They may not be responding to Indian men, but Indian men reply 55 percent of times. Middle Eastern, Asian and Blacks also reply back 51 percent.  Only 40 percent of Indian female contact to white males is reciprocated.

The main results of this OkCupid survey (as detailed in their blog post)  are

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 Black women are sweethearts. Or just talkative. But either way, they are by far the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often.

White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.

Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.

White guys are shitty, but fairly even-handed about it. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often. It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed. It’s interesting that white males do manage to reply to Middle Eastern women. Is there some kind of emergent fetish there? As Middle Easterners are becoming America’s next racial bogeyman, maybe there’s some kind of forbidden fruit thing going on. (Perhaps a reader more up-to-date on his or her Post-Colonial Theory can step in here? Just kidding. Don’t.)
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United States and United Kingdom are two countries that have substantial and successful Indian populations.  While there are many variables to any such survey and it will never be 100 percent accurate, it reinforces what one hears from family, friends and colleagues in USA. 

Techgoss note: Techgirl is a senior Tech journalist who reports on the IT, KPO and KPO Sectors for a leading media house.  In her spare time, she dabbles in satire in her blog http://techgirltalk.blogspot.com