Are 80% of women really only attracted to 20% of men?
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If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better. Hello and thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Lizzie McNeill. You may have heard of Netflix's new psychological drama, Adolescence. It tells the story of a seemingly normal young boy who's arrested for the brutal murder of a girl in his class.

The series focuses on how young men are being radicalised against women by various podcasts, blogs and forums that make up the anti-feminist movement, the Manosphere. These podcasts often give men tips about how to be an alpha male and promotes the idea that feminism has set back men's rights. The sites use a range of material to back up their claims, including statistics.

And one such statistic was quoted in Adolescence. 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men. Women, you must trick them because you'll never get them in a normal way. Right, well, that certainly is an incredibly suspicious-sounding statistic. I have questions, a lot of questions, but I guess the first should be, where did this come from?

You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about where this has come from. I'm Marina Adshade. I'm a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. The origins of 80-20 as a general rule might surprise you. I honestly think this has come from an Italian economist from the 1800s.

Pareto, who observed at the time that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of people. And that's the Pareto principle. And I think that that's really the sole origin of this claim. The idea that in general, 20% of people control 80% of assets. Now here we're talking about men and women, right? So it's 20% of men corner the market on 80% of women.

Mmm, love being an asset. Now, this idea also got traction from an anonymous blog post that went viral. Essentially, this guy went on Tinder. And did, I'm going to use air quotes here, research, basically spoke to 27 women and asked them what percent of people on Tinder that they swipe on, indicating that they like them.

And then use that to say, wow, the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule applies to the mating market as well. Did the women know they were part of a survey? Thank you for asking that. So, I mean, I actually become very reluctant to even discuss this survey because, I mean, it's extremely unethical. No university would approve this. We're not allowed to experiment on people without their explicit consent to

And the individual in question was catfishing the women. He created a profile that was a fake profile of a very attractive man, didn't tell them that he was collecting data, gave the impression that he was a potential match and just simply asked them the question. And so, of course, we have no idea who he's talking to. We also do not know whether these women were all swiping on the same men or whether each woman had a different 20% of men they contacted.

And then, of course, why would people necessarily be honest? I mean, this is the underlying premise that everybody's honest on Tinder doesn't really hold a lot of weight. And actually, even if the results that he found is true, I don't think it proves the 80-20 principle at all. Is there a problem in general with using experiences on Tinder and other dating apps as a reliable metric for this sort of question? Because I mean,

If you look at the breakdown of stats, it's 75 million users, 78% of which are men, 21% of women. So statistically speaking, women are going to have more choice than men. Whereas in the real world, the split's way more 50-50.

Apps like Tinder or Hinge, Bumble, these are far more problematic for the reasons that you said, but also for the additional reason there's a matching algorithm that's going on in the background. They want to keep you there. They don't want you to be there for a week and find somebody and leave the app. They want you to stay on the app and to continue to use the app because that's where their revenue is. And so in the background, there's this algorithm that is operating that

that, you know, tries to get you to use the app, tries to get you to level up with paid accounts and so on. And so they have incentives. And it's, you know, it's interesting, like for men, if you're on the app and you're not seeing very many people liking you, well, Tinder's going to come to you and say, maybe what you need is a paid account. Wait, so...

Are you saying that these apps use an algorithm to sort of advertise women to men who might not actually be the women's type? So might a man be getting people who are out of his so-called league or just might not statistically be attracted to him? Could that happen?

I think that, yes, absolutely. It is not nearly as organic as people think that it is. Wow. So that really creates a false environment for the man because maybe you're just trying to score and never getting a hit and it's just not what their real life experience might be. Yeah. I think the word that I would use is manipulative. It is manipulative. And I think that...

You know, when we think back to the 80/20 rule and why this idea has perpetuated itself that men are wildly disadvantaged on the dating market,

I think part of the reason why that view is so popular is because it mirrors men's actual experiences on using these apps. But of course, those experiences are being manipulated by the owners of the apps. And so it's not a particularly real experience. So how about the real world? Do we have any better data on that? Enter a website from early 2000s created by Mark Zuckerberg. In classic naughty style, it was called Hot or Not.

The way hot or not worked is that people would post a picture and then the users would rate the hotness of the person in the picture. And then you got a hotness scale. And then after rating somebody, there was a button that said meet me and people could click on it and they could ostensibly use it as a dating service. And what they find is, of course, people are more likely to want to meet people who are more attractive. That shouldn't really surprise people.

everyone. But what they find is that on average, people had about a 30% chance of clicking meet me after viewing the picture of somebody who had roughly the same hotness rating as themselves. 30% is high, right? And so that means that if you have somebody who's in the kind of the 50th percentile, say on the hotness rating scale, I'm right in the middle, I'm

I'm pretty likely to hit on somebody who had the same hotness as me. And so that's pretty good evidence that what we're seeing with the 80-20 rule is just not so true.

But more recently, the data that we've been using is data from speed dating trials. And these speed dating trials can be done on a large scale and they measure pretty good data. So for anybody who doesn't know how speed dating works is you bring a group of people together. People sit at tables, maybe at a restaurant or something like that. And then people circulate around and you have these mini three, four, five minute dates.

And then at the end of the night, you get to choose three people that you would like to have your contact information shared with.

And so this gives us pretty good information about people's preferences. This is the concept that economists called revealed preference. People are actually operating on a market. We see the choices they make on the market that reveals their preferences on the market. When these trials have been done, we find that people don't shoot for the moon. They self-assess their own attractiveness, and then they search for people who they believe are within the range of their own attractiveness.

And this is particularly true for women. Men tend to be more ambitious in their goals, but women will look largely within their own range. So no, 80% of women are not all chasing after the same 20% of men. If anything, it's men who are more likely to go after more attractive women. But for the majority of the time, people tend to date people of equal attractiveness. So

So if there are any men out there feeling despondent about dating, the 80-20 rule is rubbish and your dating app could be giving you a skewed perspective of your own value. Also, the key figure to remember in dating is that 0%, aka nobody, owes you sex.

And that's all we have time for this week. Please keep your questions and comments coming in to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. We will be back next week. Until then, goodbye.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.