I think that you're massively oversimplifying the issue here, because you assume that most women have an inflated sense of self and entitlement.

This paper by the APA has an excellent breakdown on the subject: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000078.pdf

To quote from its conclusion, men tend to have higher self-esteem than women, especially in Western countries, and self-esteem tends to increase with age for both genders.

If you're trying to correlate an inflated sense of self-worth with higher dating requirement, then the average man should have an even longer laundry list than the average woman: That's not even going into the body image and self-doubt issues that are generally more common in women than in men (or, at least, more readily reported).

That 2.5% claim doesn't hold water either: The percentage of people in a relationship each year is much higher than 2.5%, and that's leaving out the number of people who are casually dating. If you were right, it would mean that the majority of these people are settling for an unattractive partner, which would contradict your statement about women's insanely high requirements: If they're settling, it means that their sense of self-worth isn't as high as you think it is.

Furthermore, you're assuming an entirely free and open dating market, whereas people are generally constrained by who they can date at any given time: The dating pool is usually segregated by geography and different social factors such as income, education, race, etc. At best, you could say that women desire the cream of the crop within their respective dating pools, rather than worldwide.

There are other problems with your statement too: You assume that men have no requirements of their own, and would be happy enough to have any woman simply jump into bed with them. Not only does that ignore the fact that men also have their own set of physical requirements for women, you're also ignoring the criteria that men might use to select a long-term relationship beyond basic physical attraction, or sex.

I think that your main problem is that you're conflating what people fantasize about, with what they actually go after: Men and women always fantasize about the highest value people they can think of (although there are limits to what they think of, in many cases), but both tend to go for a pretty realistic match. You're presuming that women, and only women, are always waiting for an imaginary prince charming and completely ignore everyone else.