How couples meet has fundamentally changed over the past 10 years with the advent of online dating. In 1998, roughly 2% of couples met online, that number then rose to 20% in 2008, and by 2017 nearly half of all couples were meeting through online platforms. This drastic change in how people connect was bound to impact society. Whilst one might have predicted that dating apps would diversify social circles and lead to more cross-cultural or cross-class marriages, they appear to be doing the very opposite.
Shockingly, in the US, research has found that dating apps might be to blame for almost half of the rise in income inequality among households between 1980 and 2020. Although income is rarely a conscious factor when choosing a partner, between 2008 and 2021, education and skills have been increasingly prioritised when looking for a partner.
Dating apps emphasise specific characteristics when selecting a partner, with some even allowing users to filter by education. Education and skills, more than income itself, are the two main contributors to inequality through the selection of a spouse. When highly-educated individuals marry, it often leads to financial success, and they pass on their skills and education to their children, reinforcing traditional class structures and limiting social mobility.
Dating apps reinforce class hierarchies in more subtle ways too. Users tend to unconsciously choose people of a similar background to themselves based on their profile. The nature of dating apps encourages people to try to ‘market themselves’ with clever puns and cultural references, a practice that clearly favours those who are better-educated. For instance, in an article by Refinery, a dating app user named ‘Colin’ says he is definitely more likely to ‘like’ someone who makes ‘good cultural references’ in their bio, such as ‘references to films’. Other interviewees noted that they would tend to ignore a profile with grammar or spelling mistakes, a factor often correlated with one’s quality of education.
Subtle signals to someone’s background are not limited to bios and descriptions on profiles. Photos can be used, albeit subliminally, to reveal clues of socioeconomic background. Colin recalled one particular profile that stood out to him was a woman sitting by her piano in black and white. Subconsciously, Colin may not have singled out the photo solely for its elegance and attractiveness, but instead because of its silent undertones. A piano signifies wealth and a rich cultural knowledge. However unconscious it may be, the subtext of an image is powerful, especially in the market of online dating, where decisions are based on an impulsive tap on a screen. Quantifying a choice without meeting a person requires context, and online this is presented in the form of brief prompts, bios and images with the rest of the story at your own inference and bias.
There is a well-documented correlation between attractiveness and income levels. Research has suggested that high facial attractiveness is associated with earnings 2% higher than those with lower facial attractiveness. Given that dating apps heavily emphasise appearance, it would be reasonable to assume that they have facilitated and further bloated the existing income inequality, by favouring users who are more conventionally attractive.
Supposing Tinder is its own economy, one source estimates it to have a Gini coefficient of around 0.58. This would suggest Tinder has more inequality than 95% of the world’s economies, grouping it with countries such as Brazil, Namibia and Venezuela. This calculation was based upon the extremely uneven distribution of ‘likes’ based on attractiveness, and the outcome demonstrated that the most attractive 78% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men on the platform. According to these statistics, for every attractive man, there are four women vying for their attention, which puts into perspective the toxic imbalance that dating apps cultivate. Accepting this as a norm will only exacerbate inequalities, eroding our chances of achieving an egalitarian society,
As the number of users of dating apps has grown exponentially over the past decade, the social impact is expected to grow, widening socioeconomic inequalities. In 2016, there were 241 million people on dating apps and by 2022, that number had jumped to 366 million. With this rapid increase, this issue is not likely to end anytime soon. So, next time you’re swiping, consider why you ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ someone, it might be more revealing than you think.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Juliescribbles (see also https://www.scribbler.com/)
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