In an earlier post I found that contrary what's claimed in the infamous OkCupid blog post, the message premium for attractive people is nearly the same for both sexes. 20% of the most attractive men and women receive 41% of the messages.

However, look what happens when we adjust the curve for males such that they receive on average just as many messages as females:

https://i.imgur.com/0sdfdi0.png

Now the most attractive men receive more messages than the most attractive women! But something odd happens in the lowest regimes of attractiveness: Here men now also receive more messages than women.

Possible explanations:

  • Women are more attracted to status/wealth, so they might be more likely to message very unattractive but successful men (unlikely in my estimation because it probably does not happen often; also such men are unlikely rated as very unattractive).
  • Men receive some sort of minimal rate of messages that women don't, e.g. for being ~5 times more likely to initiate a chat in the first place. Those messages might mostly be rejections or replies out of politeness. Or it might perhaps be system messages from OkCupid.

Removing these messages such that the least attractive men and women receive the same number of messages as the least attractive women when adjusting the overall average messages to be the same for both sexes, one finds that the attractiveness premium of attractive women is now somewhat larger than that of attractive men: The top 20% of men receive 49% of the messages and the top 20% of women receive 41%.

I think there is a good chance now that women actually care more about looks than men, not least because they also gossip more about looks.