I was fascinated by the following post by /u/catchandthrowaway showing that in his local community, women on Okcupid strongly prefer dominant men. He did a search on the following two questions:

'In your ideal sexual encounter, do you take control, or do they?' and 'Not as in whips and chains, but in general, do you prefer your partner to be...'

I wanted to see if I could replicate the same results in my own area. I have the benefit of a somewhat larger sample size than him, and I live in an area that could be said to be diverse, liberal and progressive. So if political-cultural factors were driving his result, they should be contradicted by mine.

Results were as follows:

410 women answered they want their partner to take control of sexual encounters, while only 40 said they wanted to take control. This strongly confirms the findings in the OP.

268 women said they preferred a dominant partner. 504 preferred a balanced partner. 10 said they wanted a submissive one. This partially confirms the findings of the OP, but also suggests that women in my area tended to prefer a balanced partner moreso than a dominant one.

In addition I did searches for women filtering for most attractive, age 18-22, 23-27, 28-32, 33-37, and 38-70, confidence level ( as determined by okc's formula), education (high school vs. grad school), and whether or not they identified as feminist.

For each group I constructed a dominance score.

For the "take control in bed" question the dominance score was the number who said they wanted their partner to take control divided by the number who said they wanted to take control. A perfectly egalitarian score would have been x/x =1. The higher the number, the more imbalanced towards male dominance. This I called BedScore (BedScr)

For the "dominant/submissive" outside the bedroom question, I divided the number of women who said they wanted a dominant partner by the sum of the number who wanted a balanced partner and the number who wanted a submissive one (since the submissive figure was generally insignificant). This number was between 0 and 1 for all groups. The lower the number, the less tilted towards masculine dominance. This I called LifeScore (LifeScr)

Results were as follows:

Of women rated physically attractive ("hot"), they had a Bed Score of 17.8 compared to 10.4 overall. Meaning that "hot" women were 17.8x more likely to prefer to be dominated in bed than dominate, compared to 10.4x for women overall. They had a Life Score of 0.70, compared to 0.52 overall, meaning they were 70% as likely (or 30% less likely) to want to be dominated outside of bed as they were to want a balanced partner or to dominate, compared to 52% (or 48% less likely) for women overall.

There was no overall clear pattern of women wanting to be dominated in bed by age.

However, as women got older, the preference for wanting a dominant partner outside of bed receded. The Life Score for each bracket in chronological order was 0.70, 0.53, 0.43, 0.40, and 0.26. Women in the 38-70 age group were 4x as likely to want a balanced partner as a dominant partner. This may be the product of life experiences showing them a balanced partner is a better choice.

The pool of women rated by okcupid as "confident" was very similar to the overall pool. This would tend to contradict the BP hypothesis that RP dominance advice only works on insecure women.

Education had no significant impact on the Bed Score, but it did on the Life Score. Women who graduated from high school had a Life Score of 0.54, but women who had graduate degrees only had a Life Score of 0.38. That suggests that education/SES influences against preference for a dominant partner.

Finally, identification as a feminist had no impact on Bed Score, but did impact Life Score. The Life Score for self-identified feminists was 0.25, indicating the preference for a dominant partner only half the overall population, and similar to women aged 38-70.

Overall Conclusions

1. Women's preference for the man to take control in bed is overwhelming and uniform. This may seem like evidence for TRP, but BPers have long maintained that there is a difference between "behavior in bed" and "behavior outside of bed." The BP contention seems well supported here.

2. Women prefer balanced men to dominant men outside of bed, but a significant minority prefer dominant men. Hardly any prefer submissive men. This contradicts TRP advice for men to be dominant outside of bed. The data shows this will alienate most women. However, it may attract a minority of women.

3. The most attractive women still prefer balanced men, but are somewhat more likely to prefer dominant men. Older women, more educated women, and feminist women are more likely to prefer balanced men.

4. The fact that preference for dominant or balanced men outside the bedroom is variable contradicts TRP claims that these preferences are innate.

Please see my raw data here.