The famous OKCupid survey found that women rated 80% of men as average or lower. This was long used as the basis for the 80/20 rule and claims that women have unrealistic standards, until it was pointed out that in the very same survey, in very same graph, that 80% of messages sent from women were also to men rated as average or lower, debunking the 80/20 rule myth (indeed, the survey found that it was actually a large portion of men chasing a small percentage of men).

But that got me thinking, are women really messaging men they have no physical attraction to? And the answer is of course not, it just shows that women are not a monolith. The graph does not say "every individual woman is attracted to the same 20% of men," it says that the aggregate ratings of men by a large group of women show that they only agree on the attractiveness of 20% of men.

Bob is a man doing online dating and 10 women look at his profile. 4 women think he's cute and rate him a 7. The other 6 women don't think he's their type and rate him a 3. His resultant aggregate rating is 4.6, or below average. But the assumption when these results are discussed is that all 10 women would rate Bob as below average when, in reality, nearly half of the women surveyed find him very attractive because, of course, different women find different things attractive. So the four women who like Bob all send a message to him. This rating pattern repeats itself for Charlie, Dave, Eric, and so on, with a different group of women rating him a 7 and messaging him, and the remaining women rating him a 3 and not sending a message. The result in this scenario would be 100% of messages being sent to men who are rated as "below average" despite the fact that the individual women only messaged men they, personally, rated as above average.

Naturally, there are still your super studs, your Chris Hemsworths, your Michael B. Jordans. This explains the 20% grouping at the top; these are the men that are widely agreed by most women as attractive.

Far from women's standards being too high, it turns out women are just attracted to different things.