Research on Dating and Gender Equality

Overview of interesting articles on dating and the gender wars

This is an article mostly for my own reference, but you may find the links interesting. I am trying to focus on both interesting articles and the people that write them.

My goal is to write a more personal article on these topics, but I like to educate myself more on what research has been done in the field. This article is basically a collection of articles and studies I have read and found interesting.

Dr Alice Evans

Dr Alice Evans is a social scientist at KCL. She is writing “The Great Gender Divergence" (forthcoming with Princeton University Press). She has expertise on economic development and cultural change

Alice Evans has a number of interesting articles on the topic of gender, love and marriage. You can find her substack here. Some of her stories

Romantic Love is an Under-Rated Driver of Gender Equality

This article on romantic love as a driver towards gender equality is an interesting one.

By the 17th century, churches actually criticised husbands for showing insufficient love. English Puritan Robert Cleaver maintained that a husband should not treat his wife like a servant, but act in a way that would “rejoice and content her”.

I used to think gender equality had been mostly about laws and regulations. But she shows how subjugation of women was historically done by sabotaging romantic love. Once husbands loved their wives they would start treating her better and take her views and wishes more into consideration.

She has stories about how mother-in-laws would try to keep their sons away from the wife out of fear that he will tend more to the needs of his wife than his mother. Affection would get mocked and denigrated in different patriarchal societies:

Culture can persist even after immigration to rich countries. In Canada, an Uzbek migrant shared that her husband would never hold hands in front of his friends. Male peers saw marital intimacy as a ‘weakness’, he had yielded too much.

Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity

In this article Evans discuss why there is a crisis of masculinity and falling marriages. It begins with a discussion of why one typically marry. She covers different reasons such as respect, money and love. Then she goes on to show a lot of statistics on how female education, employment and earnings have skyrocketed leading to female empowerment and leaving love as the primary reason to marry.

Alexander DatePsych

Alexander is a MSc Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience with research interests in attractiveness & dating. Alex has a website Date Psychology.

No, The Sample Size Is Not Too Small

This article is interesting for anyone who wants to read papers involving statistics. Understanding sample size is key.

If you know that the population itself has a normal distribution, this can be as small as 10 subjects. If the population is not normally distributed the sample size begins at 30.

What the manosphere gets wrong about alphas and betas

Few concepts are as misunderstood in the public as alphas and betas. The primatologist Frans de Waal, who coined the term "Alpha Male" has a video, "The ‘alpha male’ myth, debunked" where he clarifies how profoundly misunderstood the concept is. In the animal kingdom the alpha is at the top of the hierarchy but that is rarely due to raw strength. Leadership skills, socializing skills and traits that make others look up to you and admire you are more important. Being a big brute doesn't make you an alpha male.

So given that alpha's refers to men at the top of the hierarchy, Alexander makes a keen observation:

But when is the last time you’ve heard someone describe Joe Biden, George Soros or Bill Gates as an alpha? The most powerful men in the world, men in the highest positions of leadership, are rarely called alphas.

I think Alex nails what the Redpill and Manosphere community think of as an alpha male:

Spanish machismo is an even better way of describing precisely the manosphere’s image of the alpha. It is just an amalgam of masculine stereotypes. A man must check off sufficient masculine stereotypes to fit the image, regardless of their real status in society.

Did a fake polygraph catch women lying about their sexual partner count?

This article was interesting in that it shows how popular media often make grand claims due to not understanding statistics and probability.

It is about what people say about while under a fake polygraph test, while anonymous or while filling out a survey in the presence of a researcher. With small samples and large spread in data you need quite large differences between two samples for the difference to be statistically significant. Popular media doesn't know this.

Why dual mating hypothesis research has failed to replicate

The mating hypothesis is a very popular within the Redpill and Manosphere community as a way to describe women as unfaithful cheating opportunists. However, the original researchers who proposed it first time does not believe in it anymore. It does not replicate.

Alexander lays out the problem with the hypothesis here. He remarks on how there is no observed shift in preference during ovulation for women and the dual-mating strategy cannot be observed in the genetic heritage.

Larmuseau et al. (2016) conducted a recent review entitled Cuckolded Fathers Rare in Human Population and concluded, “The observed low EPP extra-pair paternity rates challenge the idea that women routinely ‘shop around’ for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations” and that “human EPP rates have stayed near constant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years.”

Are 27% Of Young Men Really Virgins? (And Why)

Another article by Alex which exposes how statistics is often abused to make loud claims.

For instance it is claimed that 27% of men under 30 are virgins in 2018. A big rise from 1989 when this applied to only 7% of men. Except the lie here is that we think it applies uniformly. In reality it is the fact that over 50% of 18 year olds were virgins in 2018. Among those 25 years or older it is only 1.28%.

Can Women Identify An Average Face?

This article is interesting because there has been a lot of men upset over women not rating the attractiveness of male faces on a normal distribution but rather rating most men as quite unattractive.

It has led to claims that women don't know how to rate a face. But this experiment shows that women are equally good to men at doing so.

How Accurate Are Facial Attractiveness Ratings?

In this article Alex challenge the idea that we should look at the attractiveness of our face as a single number. An important point he makes is that there is great variation in what people find attractive. Hence an average score says little. There can be many who find you both very attractive and others who find you very unattractive.

Facial Attractiveness: Less Important For Male Dateability

This article shows what looks like a contradiction: Despite women rating the attractiveness of men lower than men rate the attractiveness of women, they are more willing to date less attractive looking people than men are.

Men and women did express different strategies when asked about attractiveness sufficient for dateability. Women were less discriminating than men when it came to facial attractiveness. This might be surprising for those with Tinder brain, but it is consistent with past research in evolutionary psychology, which has consistently found that men prioritize physical attractiveness more than women do in partner selection (Buss, 1989; Meltzer et al., 2014).

The study challenges some common bleak perspectives from the manosphere:

Most People Are Dateable To Enough People

There is good news buried in this data. The least attractive male face was still dateable to 25% of women. The least attractive female face was dateable to 15% of men. These two faces were rated a 3 and a 2, respectively, so even at the lower end of subjective attractiveness the doors to a romantic relationship are not barred.

And it is worth noting that datability is not the same as attractiveness:

That is already good news — because you only need one person to find you attractive — but it gets better when you consider that dateability was even higher than attractiveness ratings might imply.

The Nuance Pill

I don't know the background and name of the Nuance Pill but he writes similar article debunking a lot of redpill dating and gender ideas.

The Chad Myth

This article shows with statistics that women are not being hoarded by some few lucky men, the Chads.

About 80% of both genders have sex with either one or no partners in the span of a year. Of the remaining 20%, about half of these have sex with two partners, and many of these additional partners could be a new dating/relationship partner following a break-up. Of the remaining 10%, even the bulk of these are hardly engaging in wild debauchery.

Have Dating Apps Really Ruined The Dating Landscape?

Challenging popular narratives around online dating.

For instance it doesn't look like women are going on more dates than men.

A representative Dutch survey was conducted in 2017. Of 4,934 men and 8,216 women between the ages of 18-24, 15% of men and 13% of women had been on a date through online dating in the past 6 months, and 9% of men and 7% of women had had sex through it

Swiss survey points to more men having sex than women as well.

Overall this comes out to 48% of men and 42.7% of women. 35.2% of men and 22.5% of women stated that they'd had sex with someone they met online before, with more men saying they do often.

Also dating apps don't seem to lead to a lot more sex partners:

While the research on this topic tends to be correlational, there are some studies which may offer some clues as to causality. Garga et al. (2021) found among a music festival-goer sample (who you’d expect to engage in more risk behaviours) that only 18% reported an increase in the number of sex partners since using dating apps.

This quote explains why the difference in swipe rate doesn't mean as much as people think:

To the extent that their swipes disproportionately target ‘the same 5% of guys’, it doesn’t look like they’re reciprocated much, as otherwise the median woman would have proportionally more matches than the median guy after adjusting for the gender ratio. Either they’re not saving their attention for the same top men nearly as much as is typically inferred from the swipe rate, or these men aren’t nearly as willing to reach down in attractiveness as is typically assumed.

Something that skews the data:

Men outnumber women on dating apps about 3:1. When adjusting for this imbalance, the median match rate for men and women on Tinder evens out. The average woman isn’t matching with a bunch of chads.

Dan Confino

Does some studies on gender equality.

National gender equality and sex differences in Machiavellianism across countries

In this study they find the interesting fact that more gender equality causes the character trait of Machiavellianism to widen between genders.

To clarify what the trait means:

Machiavellianism is considered a personality trait that reflects manipulativeness and deceitfulness in the service of self-interested goals (Jakobwitz & Egan 2006).

Their finding is interesting and gives some good ammunition when men start complaining about women being manipulative. All it suggests is that they live in a gender unequal society.

Multilevel modeling indicated that men scored higher in Machiavellianism than women, with a larger sex difference in countries with higher levels of gender equality, irrespective of the gender inequality index used.

They offer a possible explanation on page 110:

specifically, in more gender-equal countries, women’s increased socio-economic resources may reduce their need to rely on Machiavellian tactics to achieve their goals. This result is also consistent with the idea that gender equality amplifies sex differences in Machiavellianism by reinforcing women’s conformity to femininity norms (e.g., empathy, agreeableness or emotionality; Fischer & Manstead, 2000),

Celeste Davis

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

This article is a very interesting take on why men are dropping out of college. The idea pushed here is that once women enter male spaces they don't want to be there. A mechanism similar to white flight. That when a study gets too many women attending the value to that study drops in the eyes of men and they leave.

While I am not sure whether this holds true across all cultures I still found it an interesting perspective in the overall debate on gender and education.

Ryan Martin

Just started reading Ryan, an emotion researcher. Author of Why We Get Mad and How to Deal with Angry People.

The Male Anger Epidemic: What Four Years of Data Reveals About Men and Rage

This article deals with the problem men have with anger. Our propensity as men to get more frequently angry than women and the negative consequences it has for ourselves and others.