OkCupid Claims Racism Is Alive And Well!
OkCupid gathered the message habits of over million of their users from their on-line dating user data base and came to the conclusion that racism is alive and well. To read their findings visit the OkCupid article here.
OkCupid arrived to the conclusion that racism is alive and well by illustrating that a race was a very significant factor to the different response rates to messages. People who are compatible and match on their site usually reply to one another on the same rate. In other words, usually the more compatible you are with someone the higher the response rate you will get is. They illustrated this by examining that when response rates where measured, your zodiac signs does not have hardly any statistically significant effect on the response rate you receive. In other words, no matter what your zodiac sign, the more you matched and were compatible with the person you send a message to, the higher your chances are to get a response back when all else is equal. However, when your zodiac sign is replaced with your race and all else is kept equal your reply rates change very significantly.
Some of the most significant conclusions that OkCupid made were that Black women write back the most, white men get more responses than males from other races, white women prefer white men to the exclusion of every other race and Asian and Hispanic women prefer white men even more exclusively. Furthermore, they found that men regardless of race don’t write black women back as often as women from other races and that white men respond back basically about 20% less than any other male race.
When the on-line dating subscribers were asked about whether they strongly prefer to date someone of their own skin color/racial background 54% white female and 40% white males answered yes, while non-whites answered yes 20% of the time on average. Furthermore, 7% of whites and 3% non-whites thought that interracial marriages was a bad idea.
So what does all of these conclusions really mean? Can we conclude that racism is alive and well and that more white men and women are racist because they are more likely to strongly prefer to date someone from their own race? Or could this be explained by saying that it is a simple matter of preference? Also, it would be interesting if OkCupid would have had their data and results broken down also by other factors. For example, it would be interesting to know whether the majority of white females that preferred only white males are from white suburban cities and whether those who grew up in more diverse populations have more eclectic tastes in the opposite sex, whether these findings would be different based on ones level of education, religious beliefs, or political affiliation, or whether your aged plays are role on how strongly someone prefered to date within your own race? What do you think about the findings?
