If you're a black man or woman or Asian man, you're going to have a tougher time getting a date on OKCupid.
Users of the popular dating site have a clear bias against certain races, according to a new blog post by OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder.
Rudder looked at millions of OKCupid interactions between 2009 and 2014, involving more than 25 million people, and charted out the racial and gender preferences he found. To do this, he studied how people rated potential dates in QuickMatch, a feature that shows you profiles one at a time and asks you to rate them on a scale of one to five or skip them.
Asian men, black men and black women got the worst ratings, while Asian women and Latina women fared the best.
Here's the chart of users' preferences from 2009:
![okcupid race]()
And here's the chart from 2014:
![okcupid race]()
As you can see, the biases stayed pretty consistent between 2009 and 2014.
It's not just people on OKCupid who feel this way. The results here are pretty much the same as data taken from other dating sites. And no, preferring to date someone of a particular race isn't in itself racist.
"Beauty is a cultural idea as much as a physical one, and the standard is of course set by the dominant culture," Rudder writes. "I believe that’s what you see in the data here."
On the other hand, when asked by Salon whether his data suggest that men are sexist and everyone is racist, he responded: "The more you look at the data, the more it does confirm the cynics’ intuition about humanity."
Users of the popular dating site have a clear bias against certain races, according to a new blog post by OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder.
Rudder looked at millions of OKCupid interactions between 2009 and 2014, involving more than 25 million people, and charted out the racial and gender preferences he found. To do this, he studied how people rated potential dates in QuickMatch, a feature that shows you profiles one at a time and asks you to rate them on a scale of one to five or skip them.
Asian men, black men and black women got the worst ratings, while Asian women and Latina women fared the best.
Here's the chart of users' preferences from 2009:
And here's the chart from 2014:
As you can see, the biases stayed pretty consistent between 2009 and 2014.
It's not just people on OKCupid who feel this way. The results here are pretty much the same as data taken from other dating sites. And no, preferring to date someone of a particular race isn't in itself racist.
"Beauty is a cultural idea as much as a physical one, and the standard is of course set by the dominant culture," Rudder writes. "I believe that’s what you see in the data here."
On the other hand, when asked by Salon whether his data suggest that men are sexist and everyone is racist, he responded: "The more you look at the data, the more it does confirm the cynics’ intuition about humanity."