How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get

October 5th, 2009 by Christian Rudder

Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if other big websites would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people generating those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.

When I 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.

First of all, how do we know that race shouldn’t matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that “true love is colorblind?” more compatibility usually
means more replies
No, we’re not: we know race shouldn’t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching. That is, more compatibility generally means more replies.

On OkCupid you create your own unique matching system, and that means your better matches are people you actually want 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 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 our trusty control, the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side-by-side, with similar rates colored yellow. There’s no real need to inspect the numbers; just observe the similar colors.

  • Throughout this post, yellowish colors are short-hand for “neutral” and red and green indicate “strong preference.”

People of the various Zodiac signs match each other all at roughly the average rate, and, as we would expect, they reply to messages similarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved:

Again, don’t bother squinting, just check out the colors. We’ll soon look very closely at these tables.

So here’s last week’s compatibility by race table (I explained how we can confidently measure “compatibility” in that post). This is a blow-up of the leftmost table above:

As you can see, the races all match each other roughly evenly: good news. It means all other things being equal, two people, of whatever race, should have the same chance to have a successful relationshp. But now let’s look at the table of how individuals actually reply to each other’s messages. First we’ll examine messages sent by men to women (I know our gay readers are interested in same-sex versions of these tables, there’s a link to them here and at the end of this post):

The numbers on the perimeter of the table are the weighted average rates for each column/row. Here’s what we can know:

  • Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
  • 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.

Let’s see what happens when it’s the women writing the messages to men.

  • 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 respond less overall. 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 in turn get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed.

Finally, here are a couple tables that shed further light on our discussion. These are site-wide answers to a couple user-written match questions. They barely need any explanation: one comments on the other, really. Together they shed more light on the theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes.



It’s surely not just OkCupid users that are like this. In fact, it’s any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would likely exhibit messaging biases similar to what I’ve written up. Any dating site probably
has these biases
According to our internal metrics, at least, OkCupid’s users are better-educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so I can imagine that many sites would actually have worse race stats. But like I said at the beginning, we’ll probably never know. See you next week.


(Addendum to original post)

Same-Sex Data for Race vs. Reply Rates

As promised, here are the same-sex versions of last week’s charts and tables. In general, they show that straights and gays share many of the same inclinations, but the prejudices of the latter are perhaps a bit less pronounced. I should say at the top that some of the sample sizes for the various race/gender slices presented here are rather small (for instance, OkCupid doesn’t have many lesbians of Indian descent), and that accounts, I think, for some of the scatter-shot nature of the color tables. Race preferences are not nearly as stark here as they are with the heterosexual data.

See for yourself:

Still, there are a few conclusions we can draw:

  • Blacks get fewer responses. We saw this with the straight data, too, and here it’s true of both gay and lesbian senders. Black gay men get over 20% fewer responses than non-blacks, which is about how straight black men fared. Black women, on the other hand, do relatively much better with gays than straights. While they’re still the least replied-to group, the discrepancy is much smaller in the lesbian community.
  • Whites respond by far the least to anyone.. Both white lesbians and white gay men write the fewest replies. In fact, across the two charts, whites respond about 15% less often than non-whites, and white gay men show a marked preference for other whites. On the other hand, gay white women don’t have the segregationist tendencies of their straight counterparts; they just dis everyone. Whereas last week we saw that straight white women strongly preferred other whites to the exclusion of other groups, lesbian whites respond to all 9 racial groups roughly evenly, and, in general, the lesbian community seems relatively colorblind. Only Indian lesbians receive a response rate far off the average, and as I said above, the sample size there is limited and the results might be skewed by chance.
  • Asian lesbians are in demand, and they’re picky about other races. Gay Asian females are replied to the most, and, among the well-represented groups, they have the most defined racial preferences: they respond very well to other Asians, Whites, Native Americans, and Middle Easterners, but very poorly to the other groups. Latin women also express a clear preference, for Whites and Asians.
  • Men prefer Middle Easterners. Gay men and straight men both respond best to Middle Easterners, and the preference is quite dramatic. I’d be interested to hear any theories why this is so.

As we did last week, we can see that all groups think, theoretically, that interracial relationships are acceptable, yet again whites are the least willing to have such a relationship themselves. This time it’s the men, not the women, who prefer most to keep to their own: it’s interesting that both in reply patterns and in their answers to these two match questions, the behavior of white straight women and white gay men are so closely parallel.

To our friends in the gay and lesbian communities: thanks for being patient and waiting for this data. We will do gay-centric articles in the future, I promise. Lately, since we’ve been dealing with complex and data-intensive subjects like race and reply rates, we’ve had to restrict ourselves to straight data in the primary post. We felt that adding a discussion of gay and lesbian trends alongside straight ones would triple the length of an already long and dense post and surely more than triple reader confusion. We will keep looking for ways to present the information you rightly expect; for now, it will be in addenda such as this one.

1,557 Responses to “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get”

  1. C-Note says:

    I personally find that it isn’t not as much as racism or bigotry, but it’s also who you will find yourself the most compatible with on a economic and social status front. I’m kind of shocked that white women would whether stay with their own race, then any other race. Yet that’s how the ball bounces. They shouldn’t be accused of being racist because they don’t want to date or marry interracial, everyone has a right their own personal preference. As long as they are not spreading hate because they don’t interracial, I’m good with whatever they choose as a life partner.

  2. Lost in Lisboa says:

    Matt,

    Speaking as a mixed-race child: no, it’s never occurred to me that the possibility of raising mixed-race children is difficult for anyone involved. Why on earth should it have occurred to you?

  3. Butcher says:

    Very interesting except, the data is good, the conclusion is not. The underlining assumption of “white ladies are racist”, is, the world would be a better place if we all just interbred and there was no such thing as race anymore. I think most of use agree the world would be a better place with racial diversity- not racism.

    Individually, a person is not racist for only finding a mate of the same race sexually attractive.

    Christian’s data is only a point of departure. Nothing as definitive as racism can be concluded from it alone. For starters, one might compare the data above with the racial break down of married couples or even the breakdowns of conceiving couples. I think what you would find is a disparity in the claims of racial indifference with actual mate selection and a high correlation in race, class, education, etc.

    In this sense perhaps, it’s would be that white woman are the most honest. Although that would be presumptuous of me to conclude.

  4. heckrod t3h says:

    I’m curious to see teh reply rates among non-hetero peoplol…

  5. funboi_atl says:

    Very interesting results, I mean from my experiences as a black man I knew racism still existed, but wow …apparently the closed minds are remaining closed. lol. Perhaps RACIST is a bit of a harsh word…but SUPERFICIAL? Yes apparently white people are generally significantly more SUPERFICIAL than any other race. So.. .to the whites that prefer not to date outside of your race, don’t get angry. You have the right to remain as superficial as you want to be…for superficiality isn’t against the law. You have the right to JUDGE a book by it’s cover. You have the right to remain CLOSED MINDED! LMAO

  6. cg says:

    This is not news to People of Color.

  7. Hannah says:

    I actually prefer black, indian, and hispanic men to white men, and I’m white. Does that make me weird?

  8. Tanya says:

    Has anyone considered the question of how closely race aligns with culture, and how that affects these sorts of statistics? Personally, I haven’t dated a lot of African American or Hispanic men, but it’s not because of their race — it’s because I simply haven’t found I have much in common with them. I’m white, upper middle class, working in technology, and I do musical theater for fun. That means I’m much more likely to date Asian, Indian, and Caucasian men because I’m much more likely to connect with them and feel we have things in common.

    I also have objections to language such as “actively discriminate” when it comes to discussions about dating preferences. Who we’re attracted to is a combination of complex factors involving experience, familiarity, culture, income, etc., and I hardly think it’s as straightforward as “I won’t date him because his skin color is black.” In my case, it’s more like ‘I won’t date him because we have nothing in common.” *shrug*

  9. OKCguy says:

    I like how the term “racism” is thrown around so cavalierly. I wonder if it’s occurred to anyone that a disposition towards or refusal to respond to a certain person’s email could be based in something other than a racial quality. As a black male, I tend to ignore the emails of asian chicks. Is this because I have some racially-motivated dislike of asians? No. I just don’t find them particularly attractive. Same with white girls. What can I say, I like a little darker skin pigment in a woman. Is that racism? No. It’s not a character judgment about these women based solely on their race. It’s just my eyes not being pleased by their physical appearance. I think certain things are hot, and certain things not. As far as I’m concerned, it’s no different than were I to ignore an email from a really fat girl, or some girl with hideous burn scars on her face or something.I’m slightly bothered by the tacit argument that OKC (and these idiots replying) has made that this is somehow racially motivated in the social/political sense. It’s not. One is just attracted to who they’re attracted to.To Dre, who posted above me – let me tell you a fact about the world. There will never be an end to everything racial, not until man starts realizing that race doesn’t matter. And the real problem isn’t OTHERS making race-based judgments – it’s onesself doing it. I’m a black man in America. Do you have any idea how much I want to bitchslap my so-called “brothers” who insist on celebrating their “black pride” and “black heritage” and “black culture.” For as much as they whine about racism, it is completely lost on them that they’re the ones perpetuating it – by insisting that, by being black, they’re somehow different and that they’re racially (though, they use the term “culturally”) obligated to take some kind of special consideration for it.Yes, there are a lot of backwards redneck morons out there – but rubbing our blackness in their faces isn’t going to help matters. What we black people need to start doing, is ignoring the fact that we’re black – and realize that we’re simply just people.

  10. Keith says:

    As a Chinese man I’d like to say “blarg.”

  11. Matthew Botos says:

    Fascinating series of posts! Dating site data has actually spawned a number of academic papers on human behavior and mate selection:

    HurryDate Analysis

    An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating

    The second did reveal some variation between people’s stated racial tolerance and their actual behavior: “It is evident that both members who declare a preference for their own ethnicity, and those who do not, discriminate against users who belong to different ethnic groups.”

  12. Alex says:

    I don’t feel that I’m one to properly comment on the veracity of these findings or how accurate they are, but when it comes to statistics, I have done a ‘significant’ amount (HO HO HO FUNNY JOKE)… well ok I’ve actually barely scratched the surface of statistics but I’ve done enough to know that results are very touchy and by no way should they ever be taken as a be-all and end-all, especially when it involves such a high amount of variability in the subjects.

    The end message that the readers should probably walk away with is not “Oh wow, people are such racist bastards” but instead “There is a higher likelihood that my email will not be replied to by certain groups of people.” and that you should instead feel encouraged when somebody actually does reply to you.

    Remember, guys, this site is not about being angry and hate filled, it’s about finding individuals that you get along with and forming strong bonds with them.

  13. Berlin Brown says:

    “There is a huge difference between being racist and just not being attracted to people with certain racial characteristics.”

    This is why people get into trouble, what are racial characteristics? Biologists, geneticists time and time again talk about how the genetic differences make race meaningless.

    Sure, Kobe Byrant looks different from Rush Limbaugh but lets say Kobe Byrant marries Chelsea Clinton and they have a kid, what will their child look like? Or act like? Who is to say. She might darker skin like Kobe or light skin like Chelsea, but there is no gurantee what she/he will look like or will act like. She or he will probably act human and that is all we prove.

    What we can prove is how people in our culture still use race as way to judge how you will act or not act. Even though immigrants still flood into the country and civil rights laws have been passed to allow people of different races the same basic rights, some people see you as your race.

    So, in the case of OKCupid, it seems that people will judge how you will act based on your race, how they see in that profile picture. It is unfortunate, but it is the Internet, what are you going to do?

  14. 27may says:

    Could you please do a study of reply rates based on sexuality? I’m curious as to whether bisexuals get a different response rate from either gender when compared to opposite-sex responses or same-sex responses that were replying to straights or gays.

  15. Steve says:

    I really don’t think this says a lot about “racism” as such. There’s a strong psychological trend that the more you see something, the more you like how it looks. For example, most people STRONGLY prefer how they look in a mirror over how they look in a photograph. I’m white, and think on average, I am probably more likely to be attracted to white women. Though I definitely have liked and have been attracted to non-whites, in the back of my head, my ideal absolutely beautiful match would probably be white. Hopefully this isn’t because I’m unconsciously racist, but rather due to growing up in an overwhelmingly white town. I think most non-whites are more likely to be around a mix races – and thus have diminished race preferences – but there are still plenty of places in this country where whites compromise all or nearly all of the population, and as such these whites will hardly ever come into substantial human contact with non-whites.

  16. Bill says:

    You made sure that guys were all the same height, but did you make sure the girls were all the same weight?

    “You only prefer white women, thus you discriminate against other women purely on the basis of their race.”

    Sorry, but that’s stupid. Aesthetic preference is not the same as racial prejudice. Do you also think it’s bigoted to find fat people unattractive? If I’m white and unattracted to most black women, does that make me a racist? What if I’m strongly attracted to a few black women? What if I date them and fall in love with them? Am I still racist because I find the majority unattractive?

    “As long as a culture pretends racism doesn’t exist, isn’t playing a part, or is merely a thing of the past racism will persist and pervade more and more of that culture. Honestly confronting it and identifying it where it lies is the only way to truly move beyond it.”

    No, people like you who try to find racism where it doesn’t exist are the ones perpetuating it. If we acted like there was no racism, there would be no racism.

    “But persistance is the key right? ……… right?”

    No.

    Unattractive persistent women will eventually get replies, since the guy sees them as an easy lay, but that’s not really something to strive for. Persistent guys just get blocked.

  17. AL says:

    As a white woman, from what I’ve experienced, I’m guessing this is cultural not racist! It would be interesting to see if the content of the messages is different from the different men.

    I work in IT so work with alot of men from different cultures. I have found some (definitely not all) black men and Indian men to be a bit more sexist. From my cultural point of view they can be far too aggressive if they are interested in me. This again is not racist there is no doubt that some cultures are more sexist. If however someone like Obama approached me I would definitely be keen! Even if he wasn’t president I just mean the essential man as he’s kind and smart and I can’t imagine he’d be likely to turn stalker. He was raised in a white american culture, so I guess I am prejudiced against culutre not skin colour!

    Also, just to show it’s not racism but culturalism I actually find English men to be more sexist than Australian men. I also find it a real turn off if a man pops out with something too sexual too early or won’t leave me alone and non-Australian and from what I’ve seen non-American men are more likely to do this.

    This article has been written by men (I love that you’re doing it by the way very interesting!) but I do feel that men don’t know what it’s like to be pursued by sexist or full on men and probably most women do so are a bit more tentative when responding to messages etc.

    I noticed that the native american male didn’t seem to go to badly either. I’m not from America but I’m wondering if the way they approach women is maybe a bit less full on or with more respect and hence they get a better response rate? I have no idea on this so I’m just guessing!

    So I don’t care what the race is but I do care very much if a man is sexist! I also find the approach of some cultures a bit too aggressive. If I had to go back in time and date men from Australia in the last generation it would hate it as they are without a doubt more sexist than men of my own age group! – and men can you imagine being with someone that has less respect for you because you are male – it is a turn off!

    I also wouldn’t ignore a message more from a non-white man but I would ignore a message that is too desperate or sexual and from my experience white men are less likely to send these.

    Anyway, I do think that this article has jumped to the wrong concusion but I enjoyed it none the less!

    AL.

  18. Mir says:

    Matt:
    It isn’t as bad as you’re suggesting it is! There are a few unique hurdles, yes, but every childhood has its problems, and people still somehow turn out to be contributing members of society! Hooray!

    I’m mixed-race (Caucasian/African American), and I do have a couple of … interesting … stories, especially because my brothers look white, and I look black.
    Interesting anecdote: when I was with my white parent, people thought I was adopted. When my pale brothers were with my black parent, people thought she was their nurse.
    This wasn’t even 20 years ago.

    None of the items in this post are shocking- they’re things I already either knew or suspected- but they’re still depressing.
    And I think it’s kind of odd when people say “I’m /just/ /not/ /attracted/ to people of (x race).” There’s such variance in people’s appearances in every racial group, it’s silly to write off an entire group of people instead of going on a case-by-case basis.
    Not that I’m blameless in this respect: I have my own racist tendencies I have to try and get over in this area, too. But I think it’s important to realize that this is something /to/ get over.

  19. ragdollheart says:

    I think it’s important to remember that these statistics are generalizations. I’m a white woman and I’m quite attracted to Asians and Latinos (especially if they speak Spanish, squee!), and though I live in a mainly white area I’ve had pretty big crushes on some African-American customers who were simply gorgeous. I’ll also most likely respond to anyone who messages me unless they’re creepily old for me. So maybe I’m age-ist.

    All people are beautiful, no matter what their skin color is. I think that deciding who you desire to date has a lot more to do with what particular physical aspects you find most attractive, and — more importantly — the CULTURAL aspects of race. It could always be a learning experience, but most people are more comfortable dating people who are culturally similar. There are many cultural and historical issues to consider when talking about race. And if you grow up in an area where you’re surrounded by people of the same race, you’re more likely going to feel comfortable with them. It has to do partly with familiarity, as a previous poster said.

    But just remember, gentlemen, these are generalizations. Valid ones, because the statistics support them, but not all white women are attracted only to white men! (:

  20. Amalia says:

    Racism is definately alive and well.. a few months ago my white prof. looked at me and told me that nursing in the state of mass. was primarily made for white females so as a african american person are “people of my kind” (whatever that means) statistic have proven that you will fail because the material and vocabulary is to hard…. WOW…. when in actuality they change the grades of the African american students to make them fail.. while the Caucasian students really fail but end up passing… it’s very true that RACISM is alive and well. But i can assure you that African Americans work 100 times harder for their education and everything else in life…. somethings come easy to everyone else…

  21. a_regular_isaac says:

    How does volume of messaging factor into this? I wonder if some women will subconsciously group by racial type. For instance, if she gets emails from 100 black guys, say, she might respond to the 3-5 black guys she’s attracted to most in the list. I could see, as the predominant race, white guys maybe not being subject to the same rule. Just an intuition as to how race works…

    So it’d be interesting to see the boxes above adjusted for volume of messages from that sender’s racial group, or at least, simply a similar matrix just of the relative frequencies of email from those sender groups so we can make our own adjustments.

  22. a_regular_isaac says:

    Another note: some of you I’m sure have read the chapter in Freakonomics that does similar studies with eharmony’s data from several years ago. In that chapter, the stats are even more damning, at least against black women and asian men: I remember some figure where, all other factors being equal, an Asian man would have to make $150K a year more than an equivalent white man to get responded to on average ( I think across the spectrum of women, all races, but it might have just been white women ). So at least these stats are a little better for Asian men…I think things are turning around slowly but surely for us!

  23. huzzalikes2fish says:

    Hats off to okc for having the guts to post this data. It confirms what I have long suspected: Non-whites get no play haha. Okcupid is the white people’s hangout. I am leaving virtual dating and going back to Chi-Town!

    Peace,
    Charlie Chan

  24. Klarth says:

    I would have liked to know the results for same-sex messaging as well.
    I suspect there are similar forces at work.

  25. Aaron Collom says:

    haha, I love the apologetics.

  26. Thomas says:

    I almost wonder if backgrounds might have something to do with it. Within the different races, there’s sometimes background differences. For example, I doubt many people know what a sandbuckle is unless you’re Scandinavian or got roots from there. Just a thought.

  27. JeremyR says:

    I think it’s hard to ignore a big factor in this – weight. Black women do tend to be heavier. At least on this site. I think I’ve seen one normal black woman (and she actually found someone pretty quickly) among my matches

    Also, middle eastern often = Jewish, so I don’t think you can read anything about “racial bogeymen” into the reply rates for them…

  28. Tom says:

    This surprises people? Look at the comments and some of them for the most part pathetic excuses to justify it as i’m sure they don’t even realize it. PC society has made it subconscious.

    Most people today aren’t intentionally racist, they’ve been indoctrinated into it over the years. People forget that wholesale state and media sanctioned official Racism/Colonialism and etc only ended less than a generation or two ago, and that the generation and ones before are still alive and well today and are the parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents who were born and bred with such racism and passing it along to their children. Think about it: Why do you think that Nazism and the KKK still survive to this day?

    White women are told the stereotype that Black and Latin men are great in bed, bad fathers and “sexist” and “aggressive” and will “rob” and “rape”. Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans (as well as Indians and Asians) are told about the “White devils”. Not just limited to that category of race. Japanese don’t date Chinese. Jews don’t date gentiles. Catholics don’t date Protestants. So on and so forth/

    Some people would like to date outside of their race, but are afraid because of bringing said boyfriend/girlfriend home to parents, grandparents, etc who still harbor old school racist thoughts, which probably also explains the insanely high figure among whites.

    Although we’ve made terrific strides and progress since the 60s: a mixed race President. Most people openly and publicly flirt, date, sleep with, marry people from different races all the time, as they and society as a whole have no qualms about it, but we still have a ways to go as its going to take more than 50 years to wipe away 600-1000 years of racial and ethnic prejudice as Americans so naively think it can.

  29. Random User 57 says:

    I don’t really see much racism here. Sure, it looks like it, but I know very well that your tastes also depend on where you grew up. I.E. if you grew up in a predominantly black area, you would more likely reply to black males/females than any other race.

  30. hacksoncode says:

    In any study like this, you have to ask whether population statistics have any bearing on the results.

    For example, if (and it appears to be the case) 3/4 of the people on OKC are white, then this may merely be a reflection of opportunity cost analysis on the various people’s part.

    More clearly: perhaps everyone is statistically similarly homoracial, but the non-whites in the group are more able to “get away with it”, in the sense that a white with this preference can very easily find another white on OKC, but a black with this preference might decide to leave after finding there were relatively few blacks on the site.

  31. Gerg says:

    Some of you people just aren’t thinking clearly here. If I tend to find redheads attractive does that mean I have a racist bias? If you want to play semantic games then have fun, but it has nothing to do with the normal understanding of the word “racist” and the blog post makes no bones about implying that there’s something actively evil about it. Which is just fuzzy thinking in this case.

  32. Air_Raid_Siren says:

    Anybody who equates my preference for white or Asian men as being in the same category of “racist” as a Nazi or a KKK member is welcome to go dance in a volcano. My racial preferences w/r/t personal attraction are not subject to the decisions of the self-appointed progressives or the self-righteous, holier-than-thou OKCupid staff. They are subject to one authority only – me.

    I have red hair. Lots of men don’t like red hair. Their choice.

  33. Levitatus says:

    1. So we look at people and have certain physical preferences. That is fine. However, when those preferences are refined enough that one can say, “I’m attracted to white and black people, but not asians and mexicans,” then the preference is definitely racially-inflected. It isn’t that you like or dislike a certain hue of skin, a certain color hair, or a certain facial shape. No, it’s rooted in a racial category, a set of associations with physical appearance that have been used to justify some truly egregious acts. I am not accusing anyone of being willfully and negatively racist, or I’d have to accuse myself. But if we aren’t racist consciously, then our preference is, and we have to be vigilant, to make sure that doesn’t cross over into racist behaviors in other parts of our lives.

    So, simply saying you aren’t racist isn’t sufficient. Not seeing it does not make it not exist.

    2. That being said, I have to agree with AL. It’s more complicated than that. We have certain impressions of different ethnicities too, and they can be true, in the sense that the average person in a certain ethnicity will be more sexist than the average person in another, and these “average people” determine our choices. Sure. The problem is when that average person becomes representative, a stereotype, and every person from a certain ethnicity is judged as being representative of it. Some Australians are hardly sexist at all! Some might be radically sexist! And some arbitrary selection is necessary in life, and in dating, but you could be cutting out someone pretty decent by making that decision. And when you look at a black person for example, and automatically assume “more sexist” from the start, the comfortable bubble of “culture/ethnicity” pops, and it’s right back to race. And you might be making a racist judgment.

    So there are many considerations here, including culture, ethnicity, personal preference, sexual desire, but these are inextricably linked to race. Which doesn’t mean race is the sole issue, but that when we say race, we have to deal with these concepts, and when we use these concepts, we have to deal with race. They are interrelated in such a way that they can be distinguished somewhat, but not separated. So let’s go read some Judith Butler and Franz Fanon now and try to figure this thing out.

  34. Guy Fawkes says:

    I am a white male. I have responded to 100% of the non-white women (that is, three blacks from Africa and two Philippinas) who have contacted me. All of the Africans turned out to be scammers, and I now assume that any “African woman” who contacts me is a scammer. The Philippinas were serious Christians (I am an atheist) with poor English language skills. Even if I was interested in these women, I know from experience how difficult and expensive it is to bring foreign women into the United States. There is no way I would want to go through that again.

    As I noted above, I have responded to all of the non-white women who have contacted me, but I can understand why most men wouldn’t. It isn’t necessarily racism.

  35. Lib says:

    @apples, a lot of you guys are just idiots.

  36. a horses ass says:

    I’m not a racist, I just like other races less than my own.

  37. ap says:

    This is really depressing… I’d be interested in seeing this broken down by location.

  38. Thor says:

    Net-net: It’s good to be white.

  39. Dan says:

    Reply rates aren’t everything, right? If someone is getting inundated with messages, they are less likely to reply. So, it could be that Asian men are 10 times more likely to send messages to Asian women, based more on their shared ethnicity than on any particular matching attributes, and so the response rate for that pairing is lower. If other groups are more likely to send messages to send messages to Asian women based on more substance, that could explain the difference.

    I’d be interested to see the rates that each group compared to their match percentage, to see if it is inversely related to the recipients’ response rate.

  40. Codexon says:

    Thanks to the OkCupid team that they didn’t scramble last week’s race diagram.

    I wrote an article about that diagram in my website and quite a few people came out of the woodwork to tell me that I was wrong and those figures couldn’t be real!

    I’m at a loss as to why so many people want to deny that racism does exist. Maybe we can finally put an end to all those snide comments that minorities aren’t being “confident” enough or some other excuse as to why they aren’t enjoying as much dating success as other races.

  41. Joey says:

    Its interesting because before I found my girlfriend I was on okcupid and a couple of other free dating sites. I happen to be a white male who strongly prefers black women. Not to be mean, but there is a little bit of a different type of black female that look online for love than there is offline. I found that a lot of the black women on okcupid were unnattractive to me, even though i find black women the most attractive out of all races of women. so it could be the quality of black women that have to resort to online dating is what is keeping men from responding. for us white men getting the most responses? well hey, what can i say, we’re just charming? hahaha.

    i’d like to see in a follow up the number of each race-gender on the website so we can get some perspective on that. also, the percentage that have pictures up? bc i think those without pictures shouldn’t be included.

  42. Wicks81 says:

    Was this adjusted for geographical location? Of the 18 users within 25 miles of me who are willing to date a bisexual guy, 18 of them are white. Of the 44 people within 50 miles of me who I match 70% or over…. 1 is black and 43 are white. That means I’m far more likely to respond to… my god, a white person. That hardly makes me racist.

  43. Ted says:

    This is pretty interesting, and kinda surprising. One side note that I’m interested in is that females of all races have such a low response rate to male senders and (with the one exception stated above) males of all races tend to respond more often. I think it’d be interesting to see maybe an average number of first contact messages sent out per week based on sex and possibly race as well to see if that has any connection here. I’m not sure if that’s been put in any of the past data or not yet.

  44. One Criterion says:

    Hat off to OKCupid for coming out with the data, including the exact numbers of users profiled (388,141 females and 638,702 males – good to know this).

    Of course, the conclusion about the “theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes” is exaggerated. Just as I am FOR gay marriage, but wouldn’t marry another guy, most people are FOR interracial marriage but simply are attracted to their own OR SIMILAR race. The latter is another important point, which actually indicates that racial preference is a bit worse:

    The second question was worded as “Would you strongly prefer to date someone of your own skin color/racial background”. I answered that question “No”, because I’d be fine dating white, middle-eastern, latin-american, native-american, and asian women, but I’d simply not be attracted to african-american women. That is NOT racism, however – I work and socially interact with black women, and don’t have any problem with it. Developing an intimate relationship, however, is a very different thing.

  45. Chuckie says:

    Please put a racial preferences section in the message filter settings. If a woman won’t answer my message because I’m black, it would be valuable to know that up front instead of me wasting my time to write her. Thanks

  46. Nick says:

    Correlation is not causation.

    That is, if men respond at lower rates to messages from black women, that doesn’t imply that they respond at lower rates *because* they are black women. There are many possible confounding factors. It could be that black women send out more letters to people with lower match percentages, for instance. Or it could be some other cultural difference such as, as catbus suggested, using shorthand like “ur”. Then discriminating based on that usage would result in a skew in reply rates by race.

    This is an important distinction, since the preservation of cultural identity involves ensuring that some traits or behaviors are shared by those within that culture, and culture is highly correlated with race. In particular, almost every culture has biases concerning dating, and it’s inevitable that cultural differences will affect dating preferences, and thereby cause reply-rate differences.

    That said, of course, it’s completely possible that these differences ARE caused by racism–it’s just not the only explanation.

  47. Brendan says:

    These blogs are quite interesting, and make me want to get my mitts on your data.

    But here’s my suggestion: why don’t you go hardcore and do a big ANOVA, or principal components analysis, or some such multivariate technique? I’d imagine, there’s the potential to get some really powerful information out of the data. You could see the relative strength of different variables’ effects on reply rate, and whether there were interaction effects, and so on. That would really be rad.

  48. banksean says:

    This series of posts is interesting, funny, and quite attractive, visually. Like a good date.

  49. CRM__114 says:

    This is stunningly stupid on multiple levels.

    First and most obviously, if you prefer to date someone the same age as you it doesn’t make you an “ageist”, if you prefer to date someone in the same physical shape as you it doesn’t make you a “weightist”, and if you prefer to date someone the same race as you it doesn’t make you a “racist”. Judgments of subjective attractiveness are not judgments of moral worth.

    Second, you do a poor job of presenting the evidence. The only relevant bit of data in this long post is the final table; all your match matrixes show is that black women don’t get responses from anyone, so they feel compelled to respond to everyone, and white women don’t get repsonses from white men, so they have to make it up by responding more often to white men.

    Finally and most interestingly, you completely ignore the amazing implications of your second figure: above ~60% YOUR MATCHING ALGORITHM IS COMPLETELY USELESS. I rarely even bother to look at profiles below 60%, so I am getting zero value from paying attention to differences in match score. From 60% to 95%, in other words virtually the entire range of profiles I -and I bet most people- are considering, Match% is completely unpredictive of response rate. Talk about burying the lede!

  50. Dave says:

    This is disheartening to say the least. Me being a black male and all really doesn’t give me any advantages whatsoever, and at the same time, know damn well that the recipient ratios, that I shouldn’t even try at all. I date anyone regardless of race, but at the same time, this doesn’t bode well at all if its not reciprocated.