I'm talking about this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/glusie/its_time_for_the_return_of_this_study_the_only/

Which quoted this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4043335/

I was looking at the study, and some of the numbers looked off on Figure 5. Figure 5 was the one that appeared to show that men got a better deal out of online dating than women did. I emailed the professor and asked if there was something wrong with my understanding of Figure 5, or if there was a mathematical mistake, or maybe the "male" and "female" labels were reversed. Turns out, that's exactly what happened. He responded to my email and said that the labels were reversed (it was not the final draft of the paper), that he had tried to fix the paper on the ncbi website without success, but the final version of the paper had the correct information. Here's a screenshots of the updated paper showing Figure 5: https://imgur.com/tC0ymBP (I can post the pdf somewhere if you'd like to see it.)

What this means is that the conclusions reached in the earlier post (from 5 days ago) are backwards.

To make things more understandable: what the paper did was put men and women into five tiers based on attractiveness. I'll refer to the top 20% of each gender as "5-star", the 60th-80th percentile as "4-star", all the way down to the bottom 20% as "1-star". "message-senders" are people who sent the first message. "message-receivers" are people who received the first message.

From the original post (I re-ordered the items to show who had the best results talking to higher-tier people of the opposite sex):

Per Figure 4 and Figure 5, after 5 messages:

3-star female message-senders end up talking to higher-tier men in 58% of cases

3-star male message-receivers end up talking to higher-tier women in 55% of cases

3-star male message-senders end up talking to higher-tier women in 50% of cases

3-star female message-receivers end up talking to higher-tier men in 35% of cases

Yes, women WANT the best, but they don't GET the best. Women aim higher, settle lower. Men search wider, select later. Men come up more likely to date up.

Basically, it seemed to show that women who received messages (rather than sending them) ended up talking with fewer higher-tier people than anyone else did. This seemed to show that women aimed high, but ended up settling more than anyone else. (Keep in mind that men sent the vast majority of first-messages - 4 times as many as women did, so, in general, "male senders" and "female receivers" are the most common groups in the data.)

But, those results were wrong. Here's the updated results.

What the paper actually found was that, after 5 messages:

  • The 3-star women message-senders were talking to higher-tier men 58% of the time.
  • The 3-star women message-receivers were talking to higher-tier men 55% of the time.
  • The 3-star men message-senders were talking to higher-tier women 50% of the time.
  • The 3-star men message-receivers were talking to higher-tier women 35% of the time.

So, this completely flips the conclusions. It shows that women end up with the best dating results, regardless of whether they are sending or receiving the first message. Women get a 3% boost by sending the first message. While men get a 15% boost by sending the first message. But, in all cases, women ended up having an easier time attracting higher-tier members of the opposite sex. Men who did the work of sending the first message still got results 5% lower than women who simply received messages.

This should also give some support to the claim that men have dating problems, and why some men are unhappy with their dating lives.

Edit: If you want a more-full picture of the results in the paper:

Men sent 4x as many messages as women.

When women sent a first message, 42% of them got a response. When men sent a first message, 21% of them got a response -- i.e. half the response rate of women senders. (This was despite the fact that men tended to aim slightly lower than women; see data below.)

When women sent a first message, 7% of them reached 5 reciprocated responses. When men sent a first message, 3% of them reached 5 reciprocated responses.

When 3-star women sent the first message: Her messages were set to: 78% were to men more desireable than herself, 13% to men equally desireable as her, 9% to men less desireable than her. After 5 reciprocated responses, the men she was talking to were: 58% were more desireable than herself, 23% to men equally desireable, 20% to men less desireable than her.

When 3-star men sent the first message: His messages were sent to: 72% were to women more desireable than himself, 17% to women equally desireable as him, 10% to women less desireable than him. After 5 reciprocated responses, the women he was talking to were: 50% were more desireable than him, 25% to women equally desireable, 24% to women less desireable than him.

When 3-star women received a (first) message: Her messages were sent from: 28% were from men more desireable than her, 23% equally desireable as her, 49% less desirable than her. After 5 reciprocated responses, the men she was talking to were: 55% were more desirable (than her), 21% equally desirable as her, 23% less desirable than her.

When 3-star men received a (first) message: His messages were sent from: 15% were from women more desirable than him, 18% were equally desireable as him, 68% were less desireable than him. After 5 reciprocated responses, the women he was talking to were: 36% were more desirable (than him), 23% equally desirable as him, 41% less desirable than him.