No, the 80/20 rule does not exist

A cornerstone of redpill ideology and most dating discussions on Reddit is the belief that 80% of women are chasing the top 20% of men (hereafter "the 80/20 rule," but the actual numbers will vary depending on what's convenient for whatever argument is being made) and it has been repeated so often that it's treated as a fact despite the fact that it's completely made up and there is no evidence to support it. You will see people arguing all the time that there are studies that prove the existence of this "rule," but when you actually ask for the evidence, you'll get:

1. an OKCupid survey from 2009

2. a Medium blog where a guy poses as a hot guy to collect "data"

3. one of a dozen or so studies that shows women find physically attractive men physically attractive but does not remotely support the existence of the 80/20 rule and, frequently, actually disproves it

OKCupid Survey

Let's start with the OKCupid survey. Back in 2009, OKCupid published a survey of user habits. It found, among other things, that while men rated women along a rough bell curve, women were much harsher and rated 80% of guys as below average. Wow, case closed, right?

Nope! Because the first thing to note is that women did not rate 80% of guys as below average, but 80% of guys' pictures as below average. Spending any time on a dating sub and you will hear guys asking about how to improve their pictures and complaining that guys just don't spend as much time taking pictures of themselves as women, putting them at a disadvantage. Moreover, the composition of the picture has a major impact as well: a hot guy holding a dead fish is going to be rated lower than a hot guy in nice clothes in a candid picture.

As we read the article and look at the very same graph where women rated men's attractiveness, we find that while women were harsher with their ratings of men's pictures, they were much more generous with their messaging with 80% of messages being sent to men whose photos were rated as average or lower. This same survey found that it was in fact men who were chasing the top tier women, with 2/3 of all messages being sent to the top 1/3 of women. From the article:

This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.

This will be a recurring theme as you debate redpillers on these subjects. They will link dump studies with cherry-picked quotes while ignoring that the study as a whole either doesn't support their argument, or actually contradicts it.

Medium blog

Buckle up for this one. In 2015, a blogger published an article where they posed as a hot dude and interviewed "females" (they use "females" and "men" in the same sentence several times). They interviewed 27 women and claims they provided data that supports the 80/20 claim. The questions that were asked, the responses, the demographics of the women, basically anything that could potentially validate these conclusions is entirely absent. They literally expect you just to take their word for it.

What's especially interesting about redpillers presenting this "study" (and the 80/20 argument in general) is that whenever a study is presented to contradict their worldview, every single one of them instantly turns into a peer-review expert and will claim the study is invalid for all sorts of reasons, whether real or imagined. And that, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing; good-faith scrutiny should always be considered (emphasis on the "good faith"). The hypocrisy comes that these same people will uncritically swallow bullshit like this Medium blog while parroting the 80/20 rule--which, again, has no study supporting--and then will provide their own studies as "proof" while completely ignoring what the study says.

In any case, it goes without saying that a blog post claiming to have performed a study while providing absolutely no data does not support the 80/20 rule.

Various studies

There's a bunch of studies here, but they all generally fall into one of two categories:

1) "This study states that women find ___ attractive!" while ignoring that it does not state that women only find ___ attractive and also does not show the existence of the 80/20 rule

2) "This study states that women find ___ attractive!" while ignoring that it states that men find a comparable attribute as attractive, if not more and also does not show the existence of the 80/20 rule

A popular link is this out of context image from a study (commonly referred to as the "Chicago study") about what men and women find attractive in potential partners. There are a series of graphs that show how the two genders can offset various "deficiencies" with other attributes. This not-at-all cherry-picked table compares how much money a person would have to make in order to offset their height. You will see a lot of people proudly share this image showing that short men would have to make oodles of money to be considered as attractive as a tall man while ignoring that in the very same table it shows that men regard tall women as so unattractive, that no amount of money could ever offset their unattractiveness.

The whole study is worth a read and has a number of interesting tables and graphs, such as Figure 5.4 (page 56) that shows that only the absolute shortest men suffered negatively as a result of their height (i.e., had fewer matches than the baseline), nearly all women who were taller than average had negative outcomes in their matching.

The most important takeaway is that there is no study (and if I'm wrong, you are welcome to present one) that has confirmed the existence of anything resembling the 80/20 rule. You are not required to treat it as a fact, which many redpiller will try to insist on because it is a lynchpin in redpill ideology. If the 80/20 rule doesn't exist, then the entire RP view of dating and relationships comes crumbling down.