How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get

October 5th, 2009 by Christian

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 the other major online dating players 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 paying them 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 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.)
. . .

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 probably not just OkCupid users that are like this. I don’t want anyone walking away from all this thinking that OkCupid users exceptionally horrible people. It’s likely that any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would 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.

For a further discussion of race and replies, the same-sex equivalents of this post’s data are here.

. . .

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1,081 Responses to “How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get”

  1. Jared

    This is an eye opener, thanks. I’ve always operated on the assumption that there are more men on dating sites than women, hence women get inundated with messages. And that’s really as far as my assuming mind has been able to take me. I hadn’t even begun to think about factors like race.

    Well, since I’m much more likely to get replies from black women, I’m going black. I wonder, do these results apply to the real world as well?

  2. Ben

    Correlation/Causation cannot be established without integrating a multitude of missing factors such as message length, proper grammar, compatibility %, etc. which may be racially correlated as some people have pointed out, and those missing factors are likely cultural and not racial per se. This just makes for an interesting tabloid piece in the interim.

    Also, racism versus preference for dating a certain race/races due to basic physical attraction to a look/looks or lack thereof are mutually exclusive. Many men I know, of all colors, have a definite preference for certain looks and are seldomly attracted to others, which has no bearing on how much they like those people they’re not attracted to as human beings.

    On the middle eastern girl thing: I agree with Lance that I like them more because they’re usually hot, not because of any taboo :-) . I lost my virginity to one long before any of the current middle east strife and it set a pattern.

    Also, semi serious question: how do whites fare on the marriage question when you discount the south and midwest? I bet nearly the same as everyone else.

  3. Jeff

    Yeah, this is pretty obvious if you have used dating websites, or even as a regular clubber, for a while. Rejections are common for “ordinary” men, I am by no means unattractive, just not alpha male type either. But I regularly see run of the mill white males constantly being in and out of relationships, casual encounters and such, but I have had few encounters of the sort. I’ve noticed that I have had a lot more success if they get to know you first before you consider romance, as all but one of my girlfriends have been from work or college related.

    The race imbalance would normally be OK if it applied in a similar fashion to whites too i.e. non-white females preferring their own race.. but the stats show a huge element of non-white women wanting to “white up”… this is nothing to do with white being the predominant culture of the country, because I have seen it in India and Far East too… it seems there is a hierarchy with whites on top, and nothing is changing that.

  4. It’s amazing that people still wont face the facts that this is racism. Enough of this bullshit most people look at your picture and click off. I doubt that most of the black women on this site have kids most of them I reckon are educated and lovely. YOU JUST THINK THAT THEY AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU! Period. If attraction was an issue then why are there more people of color on this planet than whites? Why are there more blacks on this planet than whites? On an evolutionary standpoint blacks have the most diverse DNA so therefore people should be jumping all over us and not the other way around. Due to racist stereotypes, which I have seen reinforced, and justified in the last few pages, blacks find it hard to date especially black women. People are programmed from the day that they were born what is attractive and what is not. People just refuse to own up to the fact that they have racist beliefs. People are actually sitting up in here and re-defining racism to accommodate their bigoted thinking. You can’t save everyone.

  5. Zeke

    This is right on. I have had countless replies from white woman wanting to see me and we had nothing in common. Diddley squat! So this hits the nail on the head, using the Internet to explore some inter racial sex fantasy and cheat on white boyfriends and husbands.
    These woman are liars. Many of them are married and live with guys and use the Net to hook up.
    This takes the proverbial rag right off the bush.

  6. B

    I know you had done a bit of correlation concerning religion as well. As a hard boiled atheist I am highly unlikely to date anyone religious in any way- regardless of race. However, I think if you do an analysis of religion by race you will see some interesting correlations there- some real shockers like people of middle eastern descent are predominantly muslim for example.

    I know who always asks for a ‘god fearing man’ by race…

  7. Mauro

    yes, racism still exists in America.
    but it also has to do with non-racist preferences.
    I mean, there is nothing wrong with liking one’s skin color more than everyone else.
    Nothing wrong with appreciating what you know best.

    Now, there is plenty to be critiziced when someone discriminates anyone else on the basis of race or ethnicity.
    You should feel proud of your heritage without that having to result in your looking down on everyone else.
    Appreciating diversity is as important as knowing where you come from, what your strenghts are, what your ethnicity represents.
    Just the way I see it…

  8. WhiteOrNot

    As long as the discussion rages on, I have another factor to add.

    I am a white male. My entire lineage is Jewish. I look quite Semitic, indeed. The typical large nose, could grow a beard in a day, dark eyes, etc. I have an “average” build.

    Now, I do fairly awful on this site. And that’s okay. I don’t consider myself particularly attractive, although I do have a master’s degree, ambition, and writing is actually my trade.

    What group, then, have I done okay with (percentage-wise) on this site? Jewish females. Surely, you will think, this is because of they see my religion as “Judaism” and instantly want a nice Jewish boy.

    But you’d be wrong. My religion clearly states “Atheism.”

    The point of this? I’m not sure. I think I’m trying to say that attraction to specific “looks” are ingrained into us in ways that are probably genetic and certainly programmed long before we can explicitly discuss race as a topic.

    I also want to illuminate the fact that specific looks extend far beyond a simple “White” or “Black” label. A white U.S. Midwesterner will have different features than a white Jewish man with an Eastern European lineage.

  9. Peter

    I think we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. What matters in a relationship is that two people are attracted to one another. Being or not being attracted to an individual is not racism. Even the fact that someone finds members of a certain race attractive or not is not racism, its just physical attraction.

    I mean, are we going to start claiming major biases because some people prefer skinnier or thicker girls? What about redheads? Boob-jobs not withstanding a woman has just as much control over the size of her breasts as she does over the color of her skin, but we don’t consider a man a horrible person for preferring smaller or larger.

    Yet when the reason for preference is skin tone or eye shape suddenly we freak out and start throwing around terms like racism, which in this day and age is a damning sin.

    Whats scarier is that whatever the results people would find something racist in them. Preferring one’s own race is called racist, but apparently all the non white women preferring white men is racist too? Sounds like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” to me.

    Ok, rant over. Back to work for me.

  10. Beverly

    I’m a mature, single, black woman and did a posting once as a test. That was about two year ago. I didn’t understand how you could pick someone off the internet without meeting them.

    I didn’t post a picture, I understated my income, appearance, etc. I got so much interest from white men it was shocking, my recollection is that maybe two black men showed interested. I didn’t respond to anyone. The volume of interest in the lesser me was outrageous. I wasn’t ready, but I loved the attention. It seems strange and contrary to all of the stats I’ve read about the interest in black women from black as well as white men. It was upside down. No other men from any other races contacted me.

  11. Chris

    The fact that white guys are so popular across all races shouldn’t be a shocker.

    Whether you are in Asia, S. America, the Middle East, or India if you are a women then the only race acceptable besides your own is white. European colonialism and centuries of economic, political and military might have conditioned almost every society on earth to consider connection to whites as the means of upward mobility and the standard for what is desirable. In Latin America (with the some exceptions in Cuba & Brazil), you realize that being dark skinned carries a stigma: its not a coincidence that the majority of successful Latinos have a lighter complexion. In India, even the poor look at you funny if you are dark-skinned (if you don’t believe me, then ask someone from Pakistan or Bangladesh, or even just S. India).

    With regard to Asia, the desire for white features is even more ingrained. Hasn’t anyone ever noticed that 90% of anime characters look white? Or that the male leads in many programs and movies have much rounder features than is typical for Asians? But blacks and other races are usually represented by the most offensive stereotypes.

    I want to thank OkCupid for posting this. I doubt if it will change anyone’s preferences, but its a great topic for discussion

  12. just kidding? haha? trick or treat biatches. most people know how to protect themselves, one way or another. especially around all-hallow’s eve.. it turns out alabamians are just more violent about it than others………………………

  13. a

    wow. really interesting. seems to indicate to me that white people are sadly racist. unfortunately everyone is sweating whities! personally, i would love to date a black girl.

    any analysis done on the ratings? comparing average number of stars for race?

  14. CACA

    I ALREADY CAN TELL, DATA IS NOT ACCURATE WHEN THEY HAVE LATINO MALE LOW PERCENTAGE O MATCHES WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR OWN KIND. AS AFRICAN LIVING NEW YORK I HAVE NOT MET ANY MALES OF ANY COLOR WHO NOT GO FOR BLACK GIRLS IN HURRY TRUST ME ON THAT ONE. SO I DONT WHERE THIS THING WHERE BLACK WOMEN GET LEAST RESPONS THING FROM.

  15. Hunter

    Voice of Reason — your argument about DNA is correct. Blacks do have the most diverse DNA, and colored people exist in much greater number than whites.

    But where you’re wrong is that it makes them attractive. A large proportion of animals view rarity as something very attractive. It is advantageous in almost every sexual selection situation to be the rare one — it nets you the best results.

    Personally, I know what I find attractive, and that’s it. It has nothing to do with race, although I have noticed that I don’t TEND to find black girls attractive. Although a few can get me hotter than the sun. The vast majority of those I find very attractive tend to be middle eastern in appearance. Maybe it has to do with me being Jewish, or the middle eastern skin color just being very attractive. I don’t know.

  16. Jessie Maims

    “Well, since I’m much more likely to get replies from black women, I’m going black.”

    What hell hath we wrought?

  17. It’s funny how easily you can tell who the white male posters are. These are the ones who are terrified to accept at all that they are, yes, the r word.

    A lot are claiming that preferring a certain type is simply a matter of their aesthetic preference for a certain shade or appearance, but not a racial matter.

    There’s no point in trying to undo each individual’s blindfold.

    But these people don’t understand that having the privilege to make a simple aesthetic choice like that comes with being white.

    For people of color, if most are like me, the choice of whether to “whiten up” or to “stick to your roots” is a huge one, one that is consistent throughout most of our lives.

  18. Random Onlooker

    I am definitely not surprised by these statistics, and this just reaffirms what I observe on a daily basis. I’ve been on OKCupid for a few months now, and (as a black woman), I have had no success at all. I’m open to dating all races, and I’ve messaged black men, white men, Asian men, etc., and I rarely get any replies. I’m college educated, I don’t have kids, I consider myself to be attractive, and I’m a very well-rounded person; yet, people don’t seem to be that interested in me. My interests seem to align with those that are considered “white male” interests i.e. I’m into rock/metal music, I love comic books, etc. (although these things should not be considered white; I know people of all races who like rock music/comic books, but that’s a different discussion for a different day), so the excuse that we have nothing in common is invalid. I’ll even message men who I’m 90% or higher capable with and get no positive results.

    While I agree that everyone has their preferences, I think we need to evaluate exactly WHY we prefer the races, skin tones, hair textures, etc. that we do. Look at the images that we are constantly being bombarded with in the media – the standard of beauty for women seems to be those who have more European features. Even the women of color who are considered attractive by Western standards have more “white” features. These images are planted into our subconscious so that anything that goes against this norm is rejected. You may not be aware that you are influenced by these images, but you definitely are. This is why skin lightening creams and colored contacts exist – lighter skin/eyes are considered more attractive.

    Let’s face it – black women are not considered attractive, especially black women with more pronounced features. Again, the black women who are considered attractive are those with more European features (Beyonce, Halle Berry, and Rihanna are a few examples). Do you know how many times I have heard men (of all ethnicities, not just American men) say that “Beyonce is hot for a black girl!1″ or “I don’t like black women, but Halle Berry’s hot.” Those are troubling statements. Black women are not a monolith group – we don’t all look, think, act, and sound alike, and I find it troubling that Halle Berry, Beyonce, and Rihanna are singled out as “exceptions” – that every other black woman other than them on this planet isn’t attractive.

    If you saw a woman like say, Jill Scott or Erykah Badu, walking down the street, would you honestly turn your head around and say, “Wow, she’s gorgeous”? Would you be interested in getting to know her? If you wouldn’t, sit down and think about why exactly you don’t find them attractive. It may be because, subconsciously, you are receiving messages from the media that tell you these women are not attractive. The negative stereotypes that are shown on television, movies, the internet, etc. of black women makes people not want to give a black woman a chance when it comes to dating. I just encourage everyone to open their minds a little and before dismissing the results of this blog, please evaluate why you have the preferences that you do.

  19. YHVH

    White women are actually the LEAST racist people in the dating world (at least when it comes to your definition of racism): if you actually go outside, you’ll see that white women are dating blacks more than ever these days. The media has made it “cool” to date a black guy and white women are falling all over themselves chasing after blacks. Where I work, go to the mall and generally congregate here in the real world, it seems that 1 out of every 3 white women I see is with a black male. And in real life and all over the internet, I’ve heard/read white girls saying that they don’t like white guys (not just “not attracted to”, but don’t like), and that black guys are much hotter than white guys. I’d say the average black male has a better chance at getting a white girlfriend than the average white male these days.

  20. Amen @ Random onlooker!

  21. Vorotyntsev

    I’m a little short of time, but I’ll tell you what has gone through my mind. First, prefatory remarks; I have postgrad qualifications in experimental neuroscience and in forensic/legal psychology, plus a couple of bachelors degrees, one in philosophy. These shape my analysis of and remarks on what you have presented.

    First of all, and I’ll again remind you I am hurried, what I appear to see are a set of descriptive statistics (though I am not sure that I would grace them with this term from the perspective of an empirical scientist). You have not manipulated an IV, you do not submit an experimental report, starting with a theoretical statement, then operationalising the theoretical statement into a hypothesis, or or two tailed, going into a method section, follwed by results and analysis. The hypothesis would, of course, entail an experimental design (IV, DV, conditions) and thus the ensuing statistical analysis. Before any of this a discussion of the existing literature, identification of the problem and of analogues in other domains is de rigueur.

    Thus what I would expect to see is a theoretical statement about what makes people behave in certain ways online. I would expect to see an appeal to existing empirical science accepted amongst peers in the appropriate field, in such a way that you could consequently claim with some credibility to have some glimpse into this part of the Einsteinian watch. None of that is evident. You have described how people appear to interact, but not adduced a body of existing science to support your claims and, beware, because the term ‘racism’ is a legal one; it therefore falls to you to a) describe how you justify applying this legal term in a situation when you really don’t appear to know what cognitive processes are taking place in your subjects heads, and b) to justify the hidden and declared (for you did in claiming that replies “should” be, in the absence of justificatory data from other works in the field) ‘must’, namely that people *should* interact differently, and must lose their freedom to vary in the domain in which you have chosen to dissert.

    In addition to the foregoing, I see no sign of you examining alternative explanations for the behaviour of your ’subjects’ (nor any mention of ethical approval here, the application for which would immediately result in your being pulled for lack of rigour). Could, for example, they be following the normal ‘laws’ (remember in empiricism, with the exception of the a priori Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the term ‘law’ is a reference to statistical norms, not absolutes) of attraction, ‘laws’ which work *within* racial subsets and therefore take precedence over interactions between races?

    Furthermore, I see only one race, the human race, and I am very uncomfortable when people try to inflict their unwarranted preconceptions on me by dint of their status as mathematician, while showing no sign of empirical training and insight into psychological science. The use of maths in serving up a salad of descriptive statistics rather reminds me of a little boy running through a gathering of adults, wearing nothing below the waist, with a cheeky look on its face, hoping to shock.

    This attempt to inflict a racial discussion is matched by a recent set of events in the UK (which reminds me, your reference to Obama’s election indicates that you have an element of cultural relativism in your design, and have failed to explain how you can transpose it on other nationalities, such as the Canadian, Chinese, Dutch, French, West Indian/Caribbean, UK and other users of your system), hence my sensitivity. When I studied social anthropology (a subsid) I was pointedly told by my tutors of the massive efforts undertaken by social anthropologists to help preserve cultures and nations, and that this points in *all* directions. Politically correct thinkers are often so excited by what they are doing that they forget these things, and try to inflict on the majority what has been called the tyranny of the minority; their views.

    However, and notwithstanding these things, for me the surprise is not that you have made a point, rather that is set in what appears to be a complete misunderstanding of the empirical sciences, in particular psychological science. Not even a Chi square present. No levels of significance set. No statement of directionality in a hypothesis section (one-tailed, two tailed) Finally, I have never seen an experimental report which began with a reference to the readership as “dorks”. It shows an unwarranted degree of familiarity and contempt is being held by the writer, and in me calls into question their rectitude and purpose in this ‘report’, which is not even sociometry AFAICT. The absence of a bibiliography and reference to concepts precludes any conclusion about the ‘home’ discipline here. Or was this the ghost of a statistical variant of hermeneutics with which I was not made familiar, during my philosophy degree?

    Remember, in the science of human beings there are no ’shoulds’. Reading some Albert Ellis might help here: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Albert+Ellis+shoulds

    HAND.

  22. venusdiva

    (I’m a Black woman, by the by.)

    Interesting blog post, and very informative.

    I get a steady trickle of men per week – guys that add me to their favorites, notes, etc. Most of them are White, with a few of them otherwise. I had a short correspondence with an Asian guy, and dated an Aussie for a few months.

    Now, what I notice is that a lot of the interest comes from FOREIGN men, not American White men. Men from other countries. On my other commonly-utilized social networking site, I get a huge amount of Middle Eastern men. Practically all of my past love interests have been foreign.

    What I take from this is simple. I can go to a bar in NYC and, invariably, get attention from every foreign guy in the place. The American guys? Nope. And I’m a lady who has been compared to Halle and Beyonce. I’m short, thin, model as a hobby, and am in the fashion business. I have a medium-brown complexion. I’m also well-spoken (go figure, y’all! Hyuk!).

    Let me clue you into something. US White guys are commonly hidebound and complacent with their own status. Leave them be. Just leave them. We are one country in a world of men that want us, Black ladies! Take a trip someplace, get off the plane, and get ready to go out, because there are men in this world who WANT you like you wouldn’t believe.

    Then again, I have to say…this past Halloween, I saw a lot of Black women with proud boyfriends and hubbies of other races. Could be American…I don’t know. But, yeah, they were all getting some sort of attention if they were fit and attractive.

    Some short things to remember:
    1) Your skin color isn’t a reason to hate your life. You’re better than that.
    2) This site is predominately American in focus. Go to events with people from outside this country. You will be weighed down with the amount of attention and numbers you’ll get from guys who – SHOCK! – think you’re beautiful just the way you are, and aren’t lazy like US men.
    3) Stats are just that. They’re numbers that show a microcosm of the world. This is online dating. While a lot of people do use it, remember that many of those folks are married, maladjusted, or here for a reason…if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
    4) If he doesn’t want you, keep on trucking, because someone will. A man who overlooks you because of the color of your skin is intellectually lazy, probably has a small peen, and is worthless as an option. YOU CAN DO BETTER.

  23. Jessie Maims

    If anything, this oughta encourage racial harmony in that way – now, everyone can be certain that the vast majority of white women and black men aren’t being successfully “taken” from anyone, no matter how wide the appeal of the former reaches, and how wide the preferences of the latter are. Then again, you can never underestimate the power of urban myths and true believers.

  24. Paul Virag

    Wow, this was a really insightful and interesting post. lol @ your honesty about being poor enough to throw out some cool applications of data aggregation at the (possible) expense of your users’ feelings. For some reason few of your conclusions really surprised me, maybe racial stereotypes are so ingrained in society that it doesn’t seem too out of place to envision white women only responding really well to white guys, or which races seemed to do the best/worst based on perceived sexual attractiveness. And I don’t think anyone is surprised that men reply back to women at a hugely larger rate than vice versa. Also, perhaps black women are only turned down at a higher rate because they (again, a stereotype, but) are cordial enough to respond to a greater number of potential candidates? And wouldn’t it be cool if you found a statistical correlation related to something completely unknown to both parties – like a high rate for gemini-aquarius matches or something of the sort.

    Again, very interesting article, and thanks for making the data public. I really don’t think anyone will mind – it’s hard to call it racism when it’s simply the way people respond by nature when they don’t think anyone is watching?

  25. Herschel

    What, so white women are obligated to find other races attractive?

  26. All sides have some valid points. IE: I don’t like weaves. It’s rare I see a white or asian woman with a weave but more often on a black woman. Opting out of messaging someone because they have a weave is hardly racism. I would also not reply to a white woman if she had a weave. I equally don’t like large butts, fat bellies, excessive piercings and tattoos.

    I have a right to be as selective and alone as I would like by choosing who I reply or message without thinking whether or not others might consider me racist. Retention of culture also carries meaning. It allows us to share our past with our children, future or present. So it is only natural that we seek those like ourselves most of the time. I am not adverse to other races nor do I choose to ignore people who are not white jews, but if I am spending time on a website looking I will be more selective than when I walk up to someone on the street, bar, etc and not less.

  27. Rexu

    Wow…now I know why I’ve only gotten two responses here. I guess I too was naive to think that it was due to women getting a lot of messages.

  28. 7ru7h

    An other question to ask in to addition to “Would you prefer to date someone of your own skin color/racial background”? would be “Ideally, the person you date would be from what racial background?”.

    I wonder if the majority of the answers, from all or most ethnicities, would be “white”; and why.

  29. okay

    Peter, I think you are very misinformed.

    Read the comment from “Zeke”, “WhiteorNot and “RandomOnlooker” to see what I mean.

  30. TellingtheTruth

    I’m hispanic. I’m 31 years old.

    I have always felt that white men and women are more desirable sexually. I myself do not discriminate among races, but would prefer a white girl. I don’t know why. I don’t mind telling the truth of it, either. The only factor I really take into account is whether a girl is overweight. Something about me being very skinny may have to do with my not being comfortable with overweight women.

    I’ve often wondered if lying about who I am would improve my odds with women. I can pass for a white male VERY easily and I look as if I were actually between 18 – 24 years of age. I might have to change my online information to give it a try and see. I’ll say I’m 22 and white. Maybe THEN i’ll get more replies and actual meet ups.

    However, if women want to be shallow and judge me by simple things such as race and age, then perhaps those women aren’t worth the effort.

    But then I am judging women by weight…

    Who will cast the first stone?

  31. Jessie Maims

    TellingTheTruth: Now, how upset and/or annoyed would you be if a potential date vastly misrepresented their size to “fit” your preferences? Come on.

  32. Zerogear45

    Ok, perhaps what I said before was a bit harsh. But let me put it simply.

    Ok maybe what I said was a bit harsh. If you ask a normal single guy off the street if he would want to date someone who looks like Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez (minus their fame) most would say yes. I am sure there would be those who are extremely racist but I think even racist guys in the back of their head would admit to themselves they look good. The point is if they have decent bodies most guys would be willing to learn if they are compatiable for dating.
    (shallow but its true.)

    I don’t know what girls look for in a guys physical traits but if you girls are so more about emotional connections and his financial status and shit like that, why don’t you give a guy of another race a fucking chance? This is why girls are more racist then guys.

  33. Jessie James

    Unfortunately, Zerogear, both you and I know that there’s a double standard when it comes to what men and women can “get away with.” Just like there are negative stereotypes about black men, there are also negative stereotypes about women who are romantically linked with men from outside their groups in general, black men in particular. That, and women are more interested in physical appearance than most men would prefer to believe, though still probably less so than men are and with physical preferences that deviate more widely from the prescribed male attractiveness standards for their given group, which is good news for male IR daters. Also, your hypothesis about guys isn’t quite true, not to mention that the definitions of a “decent body” and “good looking” vary rather widely across cultures, and are usually informed by what the same-race women are genetically gifted with and extend as far as outsiders’ close approximations thereof, but I digress.

    “No black woman has the interests I have.”

    That’s more than a little presumptuous. I hope you understand that some of the non-black women that you’ve pursued may justify their elimination of you as a potential partner with the belief that “No black man has the interests that I have.” In fact, I’ve seen that justification used in this very comment section more than once by people who aren’t interested in dating outside their race. If you’re going to be racially exclusionary yourself, you have to accept that people will exclude you on the same basis*, sometimes for familiar reasons.

    *Which is probably why Asian and Indian guys aren’t raising all that much hell on here (compared to guys who self-identify as black)… quite a few of them probably want to avoid hypocrisy and reserve their right to continue to exclude black women, lol.

  34. Thanatopsis

    I’m not surprised at most of these numbers but people need to stop bitching about racism. Just because someone doesn’t date people of other races doesn’t mean they hate them as people. I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there that have no problem being friends with people of another race but don’t really date them. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Even if they are racist, who cares? I’m not racist personally but I really don’t care in the slightest if other people are. Not everyone likes everyone else. Anyone who thinks people should like everyone is living in a fantasy world.

  35. I don’t know about this data but I think it is flawed from my own experiences – as a life long new yorker I have been around many races and cultures and in my experience whites AND blacks are both very open to dating outside their race…it is usually all the other races and subgroups (Indians, middle easterners, “Persians”, etc.) that do NOT want to date outside…however if you read this article, it follows the familiar played out theme of “whitey is the racist” …this is definitely not the case, at least where I am from.

  36. KT Chong

    Wow. This article has almost 900 comments. This must be a record!

    You guys — especially TheVoiceOfReason — should really stop wasting time posting useless comments. Online comments have never accomplished nor changed anything. They are not going to start a social revolution.

    Gendered-racial discrimination in interracial dating has been going on for a long time. This has not changed for the past few decades. This has been going on since I was in junior high. I am 36 now — and things have not changed much for Asian men. Asian women still flock to white men, and you still don’t see many (if any) white women with Asian men. That’s just how it is. Learn to live with it.

    My advice is this: Asian men should just avoid online dating at all cost. I learned this lesson some ten years ago. I know this for a fact: Asian men’s odds of succeeding in online dating is even much lower than just hitting a club. It is just too easy and convenient for women who sit behind a computer screen to screen out men based on races. They would never admit doing so, but they do when they thought no one is watching and would ever know.

    Online dating probably benefits most women and white men, but not Asian men. Asian men should not waste time and money on dating websites. Go out and meet real women. Asian men’s odds are actually much better out there in the real world.

  37. KT Chong

    And I think it’s perfectly okay for white or Asian women to exclude Asian men based on race (even thought they wouldn’t admit it, and they lie about it and are in denial about it.) You can’t force people to date other people to whom they are not physically attracted.

    What are women supposed to do? Date someone who doesn’t attract or appeal to them just to show they’re not racist? That’s just stupid.

  38. KT Chong

    Just because white women date black men doesn’t mean they are not racist. Racism is not a one-dimensional thing. A white woman can be perfectly fine with blacks but still have biased views and attitude towards Asians, Hispanics, Jews or another people. She is still a racist.

    Let say a white woman date Asian men but then absolutely refuse to date black men. Is she a racist? I know quite a few such white women. My (former) black roommate was fuming when I dated a couple of white woman who wouldn’t date black men, and he called them (and me) a racist. Ironically, he himself had dated white women who wouldn’t date Asian men, yet he didn’t see the problem and hypocrisy.

    Racism is not a one-dimensional thing. A person can accept all different people of all different colors — but then have problem with one particular group of people. That still makes him/her a racist.

    Here is another example. Europeans love to regard themselves as the most open-minded, enlightened, “holier than thou” people on the planet. As the matter of fact, most Europeans are more open-minded than Americans in most cases. However, if you guys have the opportunities, ask Europeans what they think of Romani (i.e., gypsies.) Then you will get the chances to see Europeans’ true nature. Even the most “open-minded” Europeans see the Romani people as dirt, as genetic defects, as genetically inferior. And they openly admit so. They don’t see a problem with that. So, are they racist?

  39. @ KT Chong

    Your comments are just as useless.

  40. another black girl

    This has been enlightning. It’s sad to face the statistics. As a black girl, I get the short end of the stick when compared with other races.

    It sucks for me, since I can be attracted to people across all races. But I suppose it’s just another fact of life.

    Although, I must admit that while the amount of messages I receive aren’t overwhelming, I actually DO seem to get more white guys than black guys interesting enough and one Asian guy. So, there’s hope yet for me! And I’m not even light-skinned! Even more exciting, these weren’t messages from wannabe-thugs either! :)

    So it’s refreshing to see some hope beyond the statistics. But when I step back in the real world…not so lucky…

    Oh, and for the guy who posted that his preference had to do because he didn’t like girls with weaves, I’m shocked. That’s so ridiculous! Not all of us wear weaves! Most of my friends do not, and short hair cuts are really in style right now. Plus, weaves are getting more realistic looking. So what was your basis for this judgment? Did you assume every black girl with straightened hair wore a weave (and ALL races have people that straighten their hair, btw). Some of us actually have hair extending past our shoulders without it being weave!

    At least man up, and say you just happen to not find black girls attractive. I can’t change that. But don’t put the reason as that you wouldn’t date me because I MIGHT have a weave. It’s ok not to be attracted to someone. I’m not crazy about blondes or red-heads for example. But writing black girls off for weaves is like writing white guys off for tight shirts.

  41. Mary

    I am a Black woman. And after reading this I realize the mistakes I’ve been making on this site. Perhaps I’ve been a bit too friendly to certain groups who decide they want to contact me when they don’t give back the same respect and consideration. Sometimes I’m not even attracted to the person & out of kindness I will reply – even if it’s a polite decline. But now, I definitely will change my behavior and become more cautious of who I respond to and/or initiate conversations with. This survey kinda broke my heart but it’s not much different than what happens offline to Black women. I shouldn’t be surprised.

  42. KT Chong:

    did you ever post elsewhere in another forum about stereotypes against Asian males in America? just a curious question, because I’ve spotted a few Chinese guys doing this here and there…

    I think your tone is a bit strong, but your points are still valid. But… why should you trust internet dating anyway? If you (ok, you and me are both Asian guys) definitely want to date someone on the net anyway, obviously there have already been some sites especially targeting at Asian guys…. one kind of motivation is of course that many non-Asian women find them attractive (statistically, the most are also white women). This kind of attraction already signifies special, race-specific preference, and of course we won’t see anything wrong with that.

  43. >>Whether you are in Asia, [...] if you are a women then the only race acceptable besides your own is white. European colonialism and centuries of economic, political and military might have conditioned almost every society on earth to consider connection to whites as the means of upward mobility and the standard for what is desirable.<<

    That doesn't surprise me at all either. But I also think racism is far more economic and cultural in nature than physical. In fact, in English usage, lumping all Asians into one group is itself rather unfair, strictly speaking. There are at least Middle Eastern people (West/Central Asia), South Asian (Indian, Pakistanis, etc), Southeast Asians, and East Asians.

    So I don't speak of Asia now, but limited to, let's say, China only. The typical Chinese racist also values European looks (many East Asians also happen to be on average quite pale, just after white people) and despise many other Asians/darker Chinese alike.

    I can't deny any racism in myself, really. It may be personal experience, or some intuitive problematic human nature. At least, there's a Chinese idiom that says "to hate the rich and loathe the poor". People don't like rich people out of envy, but also despise poor people for their poverty, dirtiness, and so on.

  44. Anfurny

    I have to take issue with the match/correlation table. The table is invalid due to the placebo effect (unless you created the table on data where no/false match percentages were shown to users)!

    [I suspect you didn't gather blind data this way because of the sharp spike at 96%+ match percentage. ]

    I think this topic is worthy of an analysis as it seems to be the premise of your site (and hence, if mistaken, compels an adjustment of the matching system philosophy). Perhaps people only know what they care about to a certain extent (all of the predictive power of match questions is explained with just the cases where MANDATORY is selected)?

    It sounds like you have a lot of data to interpret, crunch, organize, and debate and could use another mind to help you to that ends. ;) I’ll be looking for a job soon.

  45. Alex Castro

    At the end of the day, this data merely suggests the obvious. The reason why White guys get the highest response rate is because, let’s face it, going by averages, they have the highest levels of income, wealth, and education, and women dig guys who make alot of money. Perhaps if the data were controlled for income or levels of education, White men would not get such high response rates, but lets face there are more White guys out there making high six figure salaries than any other ethnic group.

    About Middle Eastern Women, what else can I say, but they are GORGEOUS. Lebanese, Persian, Israeli and Turkish women are some of the hottest women I have ever seen and that is why all guys, including white guys respond well to them.

  46. It seems that Black men are responded to at the lowest rate here online. Although, most recipients may be open to inter-racial dating, the fact remains that Black men will have the toughest time finding a mate across racial lines here online.

    My experience in this dating arena has to do purely on the fact that my advanced education and career have both played a significant part of my ability to work through some of the racial stereotypes. The quality of the women that seem to want to date me online increase with the conversations or interactions that we have with each other here online.

  47. Very interesting post. I am a single black female who has done online dating off and on for years. And I could have told you the same thing. It is nice to now know that it was just not all in my head. Like most black women on this site, I am single, never married, no kids, college degree, with a career, own my own home, etc. I have ALWAYS known that the large number of responses that I received over the years was mainly as result of my (NON-AFRICAN) looks. I have NEVER felt good about this knowing how the majority of MY SISTERS ARE TREATED. And I ALWAYS HAVE KNOWN that is because of my EUROPEAN FEATURES AND NATURALLY CURLY (Non-African hair that is almost silky shiny) HAIR. Just two days ago a white man sent me a note saying “NICE HAIR”. I wanted to reply “What the Fuck does that Mean?” But, I just left if and ignored him. That is ignorance to the Umpteenth degree.

    In my case I don’t find most African American men to be attractive. I just don’t like their features. Thanks to my “White upbringing and the media”. But, I don’t really care to date White American men either. I think it’s because I refuse to give such a prize such as myself over to them.
    So, many years ago I decided to look for a group of single men who are now in great abundance in this country and who get the least amount of attention from women. Yes, we ALL KNOW who they are. The new upwardly mobile, smart, cool, extremely well educated, mild mannered and extremely hard workers. ASIANS!!!! All men from Asians decent get far play in my world. This includes East Indians, the one from the Orient, and the ones from the Islands such as the Philippines. Yes, I have and I do date black men and white men but, NOT ONE’S WHO ARE AMERICAN BORN AND RAISED! NOT AT ALL. I have mostly only dated men from other countries mostly because I love they way they treat me. It is so different from American men. I can’t begin to explain.
    Yes, if I happen to meet the mister right and he happens to be American, I will not turn my back. But, as one other sister put it earlier post, leave those guys alone. There are waaaayyy too many decent foreign men who would be proud to have a black woman on his side.

  48. adrenaline144

    This is not accurate. I believe the graphs, but just because a white person wants to date a white person, or a hispanic person wants to date a hispanic person, or a black person wants to date a black person, doesn’t make them racist! This is crap. I agree that racism exists, but come on… You’re overexaggerating. Maybe the reason is because of racism, but maybe not. You can’t just go and automatically assume that if someone wants to date inside their race they are racist! Ugh, you just want attention.

  49. Hey I too dated a female belonging the so mentioned “black”. I really like her I had likes her in her appearance and more than that for herself. I dont have anything against the white gals. My ex Gf is a white.

  50. Julian

    A very interesting article, and it’s well know fact that in online dating, white women usually won’t date outside of their race. The book Freakonomics, has similar finding about the race and online dating. I personally don’t think it necessarily stems from racism that vast majority of white women are uncomfortable dating outside of their race. I mean human beings are creatures of habits and we like to be surrounded by what we know and are comfortable with. Now I’m sure there are some that are straight out racists and therefore won’t even consider dating someone non-white, but I think most white women are just dating in their comfort zone.