Study Reveals Racial Segregation in Online Dating

When it comes to online dating, segregation appears to be alive and well. After analyzing more than one million profiles on a mainstream dating website, researchers at the University of California Berkeley, concluded that whites are highly unlikely to initiate contact with black people.

Even when their profiles indicate that they are indifferent about the race or ethnicity of a potential romantic interest. The researchers expected to find homophily, a social science term which means love of the same, in their analysis but they were surprised that the internet did not play a role in eroding reluctance to date outside one’s own race.

“When the constraints of segregation are lifted by technology, what do people do? They don’t act all that differently,” said Gerald Mendelsohn, PhD, one of the professors who worked on the study. “Segregation remains a state of mind as much as it is a physical reality.”

The study indicates that more than 80 percent of the communication initiated by whites was to other whites. Only 3 percent went to blacks. Black members of the same site were more open to dating whites and were ten times more likely to contact whites. Black men were actually slightly more likely to initiate contact with white women than black women.

Professor Mendelsohn, attributed this to the influence of cultural imperatives on all American men. “In this country, our notions of feminine attractiveness are based almost entirely on images of white women . . . the hypothesis that some people have argued is that there is no surprise that black men should contact white women, because that’s where we get our notions of who’s pretty.”

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According to the U.C Berkeley research, a collaboration between Professor Mendelsohn, Coye Cheshire, Andrew T. Fiore and Lindsay Shaw Taylor, black women were the least likely group of those discussed in the study, to be contacted on the unnamed dating site. {snip}

“If you are a black woman on Match.com and you’re not going to initiate contact then you are not going to date. That’s just the reality,” said Worthy-Davis from her home in Brooklyn. {snip}

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According to a 2009 analysis, black women, on OkCupid.com a dating website that does not charge a subscription fee; get the “cold shoulder” from everyone, including their black male counterparts.

The cold shoulder comment was based upon the fact that black women receive the fewest replies on the site, even though they are the most likely to reply. {snip}

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The U.C. Berkeley research indicates that although black women were much more likely than their white counterparts to contact someone of another race, they still primarily sought to contact black men.

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