Same ol' same ol'. Although this one adds an additional layer of granularity with the education dimension.

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Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education

Ken-Hou Lin and Jennifer Lundquist

American Journal of Sociology

Vol. 119, No. 1 (July 2013), pp. 183-215

DOI: 10.1086/673129 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673129

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine how race, gender, and education jointly shape interaction among heterosexual Internet daters. They find that racial homophily dominates mate-searching behavior for both men and women. A racial hierarchy emerges in the reciprocating process. Women respond only to men of similar or more dominant racial status, while nonblack men respond to all but black women. Significantly, the authors find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and white women. White men and white women with a college degree are more likely to contact and to respond to white daters without a college degree than they are to black daters with a college degree.

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Predicted odds ratios of sending an initial message (darker cells represent higher probabilities).

https://i.imgur.com/S8l5Tq9.png

The left matrix of figure 1 presents the sending pattern of female users. Within each matrix, the darker the shading in the cell, the more likely the sender ðleftÞ is to send a message to the receiver ðtopÞ. Looking first at Asian women, we see that they are most likely to send initial messages to Asian men followed by white men and least likely to message Hispanic and black men. Black women show the highest levels of homophily. They rarely message white, Asian, and Hispanic men. Hispanic women are also most likely to message their coethnics, though the tendency is not as strong as it is for black women. Hispanic women’s second preference is white men, and they rarely initiate contact with Asian or black men. Finally, white women most prefer white men, their second preference is Hispanic men, and they rarely send initial messages to other minority men. Stated from the men’s perspective, white men have the best odds of being contacted by women even if all racial groups are equally represented on the dating website, largely because they are among the top choice groups for Asian, Hispanic, and white women. Asian and black men, on the other hand, receive messages only from their coethnics.

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[...] black women, who receive the lion’s share of their messages from blackmen, a tiny amount from Latino men, and practically no messages from either Asian or white men. Asian and white women, on the other hand, consistently receive messages from all men, both inside and outside their ethnic group.

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Women in general send messages only to their coethnics or to white men, and men, while appearing to cross some ethnic boundaries with relative fluidity, draw the line at black women.

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[T]hese results show that the reason black men receive more messages than Asian men in table 2 is not that black men are more popular in general but that black women have greater homophily tendency than Asian women. Overall, our results contradict the popular belief that black men prefer white women over black women and white men prefer Asian women over white women. Black men in fact demonstrate the strongest homophily tendency among male daters.

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Predicted odds ratios of responding to an initial message (darker cells represent higher probabilities).

https://i.imgur.com/xjddcWh.png

Looking first at the responses of Asian women, it becomes clear that, when given a choice, Asian women are most likely to respond to white men, followed by Asian men. They are less likely to respond to Hispanic men or black men. Black women, by contrast, respond to daters who contact them fairly equally, with a preference for white men. The responding behavior of Hispanic women is comparable to that of Asian women. They are most responsive to white men, followed by their coethnics, and least responsive to black men. White women’s reciprocal behaviors look little different from their sending behaviors. They respond predominantly to white men. In brief, black men are least likely to receive responses from anyone except black women, Hispanic and Asian men are somewhere in the middle, and white men enjoy the highest likelihood of response.

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Messages from white men and women are likely to be reciprocated by daters of other groups, but white women reciprocate only to white men. Black daters, particularly black women, tend to be ignored when they contact nonblack groups, even though they do not discriminate against any out-groups.

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Predicted probability of sending an initial message, white daters

https://i.imgur.com/g26kwH9.png

Figure 3 shows the predicted likelihoods that white daters with and without a college degree contact each of the racial and educational subgroups. The results show that, regardless of their own educational level, white women are still more likely to contact white men than any other group. College-educated white women even prefer non-college-educated white men over college-educated Asian men. White men show similar preferences as we saw in the previous sending models. Black women, with or without a college degree, are marginalized as the least contacted group.

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Predicted probability of responding to an initial message, white daters

https://i.imgur.com/ihWjEYV.png

When it comes to response patterns, as shown in figure 4, we again see persistent racial preference. White women are more likely to respond, overall, to men with a college degree than to men without; however, this behavior does not break the constraints of race. White women respond most often to white men above all other ethnicities. College-educated white women treat college-educated minority men similarly to those without a college degree. This tendency to privilege a man’s whiteness over his achieved status is even more pronounced among non-college-educated women, who are even more likely to respond to white men’s messages regardless of their level of education.

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Discussion

White men’s and women’s messages are likely to be reciprocated by daters of other groups, but white women reciprocate mostly only to white men. Black daters, particularly black women, tend to be ignored when they contact nonblack groups, even though they respond to out-groups no less frequently. Asian and Hispanic daters seem to be at the middle of the racial hierarchy. They are responsive to whites, their coethnics, and to some extent each other but not to black daters. Importantly, we find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and women. White men and women with a college degree prefer to contact and reciprocate to white daters without a college degree over black daters with a college degree.

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While some attitudinal surveys suggest that women have more liberal attitudes toward interracial relationships (Johnson and Marini 1998; Meier et al. 2009), our results are consistent with studies of stated preferences (Feliciano et al. 2009; Robnett and Feliciano 2011) and studies of online interaction (Hitsch et al. 2010b; Skopek et al. 2011), indicating that men, in fact, are more willing than women to date out-groups. We are hesitant, however, to conclude that men are less race conscious than women, given that men and women confront a differing terrain of demand and supply in the dating market. On the basis of the fact that women receive many more messages than men and that there are more men than women populating dating websites, men may simply be less able to be as selective as women can.

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Though college-educated daters in general receive more unsolicited messages than their non-college-educated counterparts, white men without a college degree still receive more messages than college-educated black and Asian men. College-educated black women receive fewer messages than other women of any education level. Furthermore, we find that, for white male and female daters, race of potential daters has a far greater effect than education does in predicting an online interaction. White men and women with a college degree are more likely to contact and reciprocate to white daters without a college degree over black daters with a college degree.

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Our study suggests that the racial preferences of minorities are likely to be as consequential in generating the observed patterns. For example, gendered racial formation theory attributes the prevalence of Asian women–white men pairing to white men’s preference toward stereotypically submissive women. Yet we do not find that white men show particular preference for Asian women. Instead it is Asian women who are more responsive to white men.

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Methodology

Unnamed online dating service with the following features:

We obtained the data from one of the largest U.S. dating and social networking websites, which facilitates both heterosexual and same-sex dating for millions of active users. Similarly to most dating websites, registered users can create a personal profile, search and view other users’ profiles, and contact fellow users through a website-based messaging system. A typical user profile contains basic information such as sex, sexual orientation, geographical location, age, race, height, body type, religion, language, lifestyle, and socioeconomic status, as well as photographs and short essays. Unlike most large dating websites that charge a membership fee to contact other users, this website places no restriction on searching, viewing, sending, and responding to messages, which, we believe, makes this website one of the best data sources for studying online dating behaviors in the United States. It should also be noted that this website does not recommend potential matches by ethnic-racial status. The only criteria used to select which profiles to display are age, sexual orientation, and the matching score that is derived from personality questions.

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The original data set consists of approximately 9 million registered users worldwide and 200 million messages, from November 2003 to October 2010. In essence, the data set consists of numerous social networks in which the users are nodes with various attributes and the messages are directional ties that connect nodes. However, in contrast to typical social network data, both our nodes and ties have a temporal property: each user has a definite lifetime and each tie is formed at a specific time point.

Sample Description and Inclusion criteria

• Final sample: 528,800 heterosexual men and 405,021 heterosexual women
• Racial/ethnic categorization based on user self-identification

Sample Exclusion process:

To facilitate the analysis, we filter the users in four steps. First, we limit our scope to users who reside in the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. This facilitates the reconstruction of opportunity structure ðdiscussed belowÞ and brings down the sample size to about 3 million daters. Second, we exclude users who did not send or receive at least one message, who did not upload at least one photograph, who listed their birth year later than 1992 or earlier than 1911, or who fit the profile of spammer users. The reason is that, similarly to most free membership websites, some of the users did not actively engage with or even return to the website after initial registration and a few users are likely to be fake identities created by spammers. We thus retain only genuine dating website members, that is, users who had the opportunity to legitimately interact with other users in the data set. Third, we exclude daters who were looking only for casual sex or platonic relationships to ensure that the patterns observed among the daters reflect the mate selection process. Finally, we exclude from the analysis in this article users who identified as gay or bisexual, a population we explore in a separate paper.

Model overview:

Since interaction decisions are nested within individuals (i in the sending model and j in the responding model), a dependence structure is expected. We thus model both the sending and the responding behaviors by fitting a series of generalized estimating equations ðGEEs; Liang and Zeger 1986; Hanley et al. 2003; Zuur et al. 2009Þ with the logit link function and an exchangeable correlation structure.

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There are advantages to analyzing our data with the GEE approach. First, the GEE approach addresses dependency among observations and optimizes the statistical power of the correlated data by estimating clustered correlations. In contrast to mixed effects or hierarchical models, the GEE approach makes little demand of within-cluster variance and thus is more suitable in our situation in which the participation of the users follows a power-law distribution and a significant number of our observations are singletons. We believe that exclusion of the singletons would create serious selection bias and therefore do not think that the random intercept approach is suitable for our analysis.

Model coefficient tables (corresponding to the Figs. 1-4)

https://i.imgur.com/Mh2BkGm.png

https://i.imgur.com/40km3Ni.png

https://i.imgur.com/SU8aUSI.png

https://i.imgur.com/zf8nmR9.png

https://i.imgur.com/6H6hkZU.png