What evidence is there for the 80/20 rule?

polarbee · 2018-09-27T03:30:31+00:00

My husband is a statistician and remembers reading a paper stating you should marry the sixth to seventh serious relationship you are in as your chances of finding better compatibility drops off significantly after that. No, there's no evidence that 80% of women go for 20% of men. Though my husband has a hypothesis that 20% of men cause 80% of the problems.

raziphel · 2018-09-27T18:07:31+00:00

It's a baseless meme meant to reinforce toxic stereotypes through a poor understanding of demographics.

tullia · 2018-09-27T21:47:39+00:00

I have a fuzzy head, but if you Google around a little you'll see that something like two-thirds of Americans between 18–64 have been married at some point. Of the young adults (25–34) who have never been married, as of 2014 about a quarter were currently living with someone, meaning they were in a significant relationship when they answered the poll question.

I'm not going to Google widely for this, but you can. The other studies I saw said the same thing: most Americans, as a large cohort, have been married. Those who haven't might well be in a deep bonded relationship right now. Those numbers alone don't look anything like the 80-20 deal, and those don't account for the never-married who have lived together but weren't at the time of that particular poll, which would drive it up more. Nor does it account for the people who might have significant relationships that don't lead to marriage or cohabitation, which I assume are less numerous. It certainly doesn't account for people who date a hell of a lot and never get to a serious relationship, which I assume does count for a lot of people. It also doesn't account for those people who don't want such relationships, however few of those there might be.

I don't know how you interpret the 80-20 rule. If it means, "80% of women chase 20% of men," what does that mean? Does that mean they won't settle for anything other than that 20%? Well, since the data suggest the numbers are even for men and women, that means that the great majority of men get married or cohabit at least once, not just the special 20%. Does it mean that 80% of women want 20% of guys and will ditch an 80%-man for a 20%-man the second they could? Divorce rates are not that high. Does that mean 80% of women would sleep around behind an 80%-man's back? The number of women who report cheating is way, way, way lower than that, at the highest in the mid-teens for some age ranges of married women.

Does that mean that 80% of women want to ditch their 80%-man and get a new one, but they're too frightened or calculating or lazy or guilty to do so? I have no idea. But if you think that's the case, I don't think any data could convince you. If you want to believe most women settle for a guy only because they think they can't do any better and that 80% of women can't really be happy with anything other than a hot, charismatic, fit, preferably wealthy guy, then what would convince you?

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-state-of-our-unions-marriage-up-among-older-americans-down-among-the-younger http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-americans-have-never-married/ https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-of-cheating-in-america

cyranothe2nd · 2018-09-27T05:46:33+00:00

There is none. It's made up nonsense.

[deleted] · 2018-09-28T04:27:19+00:00

Sex and The Pareto Principle

I. The numbers do not support the claim that most women have casual sex with impunity through their 20s, then seek a sexually inexperienced male to settle down with. Rather, the data supports the idea that the numbers of promiscuous men and women are similar, though there are more promiscuous men than women. Most likely, this population is sexually active with one another. For the vast majority of Americans who do not have a high number of partners either lifetime, or within the last year, the numbers are also similar, though again, men are more promiscuous.

II. The data does not refute or confirm the concept of female hypergamy, which is the desire of the female to pair with a male of equal or higher status than herself. Within the ranks of promiscuous males and females we may still conclude based on anecdotal observation that some women are more willing to have sex with the attractive men they would otherwise not have access to as a way of increasing their social status. However, that number is a minority, though perhaps higher than the 6.8% for all women aged 20-29 who had 3+ partners in the last year.

III. A relatively small number of promiscuous men is having sex with a relatively small number of promiscuous women.

Five_Decades · 2018-09-27T04:49:43+00:00

There is this. As a guy unless you are in the top 10% in appearance, tinder is mostly a waste of time.

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a

wiseguy13579 · 2018-09-29T18:53:01+00:00

The Pareto was created by PUA scammers to sell their shit. It's false.

MateXon · 2018-09-30T14:42:57+00:00

A bit late, but I made a computer simulation that implements the 80/20 rule.

A lot of people seem to believe that this rule means that only the top 20% of males get laid because women overwhelmingly prefer them, however you'll see that this isn't true at all.

The simulation consists of 2 groups of people, 10 males and 10 females, where each male and female individual has an "attractiveness" score, 1 to 10, where 1 is the least attractive and 10 is the most attractive. Every day sexual intercourses happen between members of the 2 groups, but the 80/20 rule is in place, so this means that only men 9 and 10 are allowed to have sex every day; of course we don't see the "top tier" males being the only ones having sex irl, therefore exceptions are implemented to allow a random woman to choose a male in the 1-8 range, and this happens only every set day.

To each woman and each 1-8 man is assigned a probability, for the former it's the probability with which males 9 and 10 choose their woman for the day (remember that because of the 80/20 rule, all women are competing for these 2, so it makes sense that they are the ones choosing), while for the latter it's the probability with which the exception-woman chooses them. The probabilities are respectively:

Women: 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.04, 0.05, 0.08, 0.10, 0.13, 0.19, 0.35
1-8 Men: 0.04, 0.05, 0.06, 0.07, 0.09, 0.13, 0.20, 0.36

As you can see they are pretty fair probabilities, they are skewed in favor of the most attractive of the bunch of course, because it makes sense that the choice favors the most attractive person available.

With this simulation you can have things that we see irl, like for example very attractive girls with objectively ugly men, or even the opposite.

This histogram shows how the distribution of sexual intercourses behaves after 10k days and with 1 exception happening every day. As you can see, all men and all women have multiple sexual intercourses, however the distribution for males is very skewed towards 9 and 10 males, while for women, while still skewed towards the most attractive (duh!), is much more even.

Does this proves definitely that the 80/20 rule is real? Not really, but it shows that if it is valid, then it's not that easy to recognize it actually is in place, as everyone is still having sex, albeit not as fairly as we would like to think.

Personally I think that the 80/20 rule is very likely to exist, putting aside that OkCupid proved it for dating sites, it makes a ton of sense biologically speaking: most animal species have mechanisms of selection in their mating process, which usually consists in the males competing for females and females selectively mating with the males that come on top.
For humans this is likely to be the case, since females have a high pregnancy period and can only mate for a limited portion of their life, while males can mate multiple times a day and for most of their lives, so there has to be a selection process that involves females selecting fit males (capable of hunting effectively, capable of being dominant etc).
This made sense when we lived in caves, however the modern world has different requisites for fitness (like smarts, being able to make the right social connections and so on) but we had only a handful of millennia to experience this, so our biology didn't catch up, and as a result women are still infatuated with muscular, handsome and violent men for the most part.

Title	What evidence is there for the 80/20 rule?
Author	ugliestman1
Upvotes	4
Comments	16
Date	September 27, 2018 2:30 AM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/ExRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/9j8zzn/what_evidence_is_there_for_the_8020_rule/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/ExRedPill/what-evidence-is-there-for-the-8020-rule.299989 https://theredarchive.com/post/299989