OKCupid – the king of dating sites back in the day – once analyzed the messaging habits of almost a million users and revealed that, despite what might have been implied by commercials where nearly every couple is mixed-race, sticking to one’s own race is alive in the world of romance. The dating site posted their findings in a blog post back in 2009 before deleting it a few years later – but Wingman has recovered their findings.
When OkCupid first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:
The takeaway here is that although race shouldn’t matter in messaging, it does. A lot.
More Compatibility Means More Replies (Normally)
First of all, how does OkCupid know that race shouldn’t matter? Are they just making some after-school-special assumption that “true love is colorblind”? No, they’re not. OkCupid knows race shouldn’t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching.
On OkCupid, users create their own unique matching system, which means your better matches are people you actually want to talk to. Below is a graph showing match percentages vs. reply rates for a random sample of 500,000 people. As you can see, in general, the better you match with someone, the more likely you are to reply to a first message from them.
We can see this principle in action when we look at a trusty control: the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side by side, with similar rates colored yellow. No need to inspect the numbers closely—just observe the similar colors.
[Throughout this article, yellowish colors are shorthand for "neutral," while red and green indicate "strong preference."]
[Throughout this post, yellowish colors are shorthand for “neutral,” while red and green indicate “strong preference.”]
People of various Zodiac signs match with each other at roughly average rates, and, as expected, they reply to messages similarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that when OkCupid compares match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. But, as with many fine assumptions, this totally breaks down when race gets involved:
Again, don’t bother squinting—just check out the colors. Now let’s look very closely at these tables.
The Race Is On
Here’s last week’s compatibility by race table (OkCupid explained how they can confidently measure “compatibility” in a previous post). This is a blow-up of the leftmost table:
Here’s a vastly different table of actual reply rates for messages sent by men to women.
The numbers on the perimeter of the table are the weighted average rates for each column/row. Here’s what OkCupid knows:
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Black women are sweethearts—or just talkative. 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.
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White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males get more replies from almost every group. OkCupid was careful to preselect the data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by their site’s picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, they did the same with height.
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White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else, and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three groups only really respond well to white men. More significantly, their reply rates to non-whites are terrible. Asian women write back to 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’ll see that white women have 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.
OKCupid then examined what happened when women were the ones writing messages to men.
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Men don’t write back to black women: Men, regardless of race, were less likely to write back to black women, despite black women being the most responsive group. Essentially, almost every race—including other blacks—singled out black women for the cold shoulder.
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White men are poor responders, but consistent: The average reply rate for non-white males was 48.1%, while white men’s was only 40.5%, meaning they wrote back about 20% less often. It’s ironic that white men were the worst responders because, as seen earlier, they received the most replies. OKCupid noted that this might have made them somewhat self-absorbed. Interestingly, white men did manage to reply to Middle Eastern women. OKCupid speculated that there might be some emergent fetish or forbidden fruit phenomenon at play, especially as Middle Easterners were becoming America’s next racial bogeyman.
A Last Couple of Graphs
These are site-wide answers to a couple of user-written match questions. They barely need any explanation—one comments on the other. Together, they shed more light on the theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes.
It's Probably Not Just OKCupid That's Like This
No one should walk away from this thinking OkCupid users are uniquely terrible. It’s likely that any dating site (and indeed, any group of people) would exhibit similar messaging biases. According to OkCupid’s internal metrics, their users are better educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so other sites might actually have worse race stats. But, as mentioned before, we’ll probably never know.
This is part of a series of blog posts that analyzes OkCupid's online-dating statistics. You can find the others here: