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Very Interesting! - would love to hear your thoughts - the results were taken from studies of online dating:
One of the big prejudices that surfaced concerns attractivess. Men care significantly more about looks then women do. You're twice as likely to get a man's attention if you post a photo of yourself online. Between your face and self description, prospective dates get a sense of your face, hair and body, which they evidently care about quite a lot. Judging by the number of first contact emails, men love long straight hair. They prefer your hair colour most if you are blonde, and least if you've gone gray or salt and pepper. Regardless of their own height, men were biased against women over five feet nine.
Men also prefer women who are light for their height. If you had a BMI of 16-18, the weight to height ratio of an anorexic, you'd have 90 percent more first contact emails then a woman with a BMI of 24, which is at the high end of the normal range. Interestingly, the average weight of a woman using dating services was six pounds lower then the national average for women under thirty, eighteen pounds lower for women between thirty and thirty nine and twenty pounds lower among women forty to forty nine. A male friend who's a seasoned online dater told me that of course all men know that women lie about their weight in their profiles. "There's a fudge factor" he said giving me a bitter smile "If a guy says he prefers a BMI slightly lower then average, he knows he'll actually get a women of average weight. If a woman says she is average weight, it mean's she's a little pudgy". Indeed, a subsequent study at Cornell University on deception in online dating found that women do underreport their weight, 64 percent of women shed five pounds or more in their online profiles.
Meanwhile, women homed in on the part of men's profiles that specify their income. Guys who said they earned an annual income of $250,000 or more received 34 to 151 percent more first contact emails from women than their peers who made an average salary of $62,500. (Salary inflation is apparently as common as weight deflation). How much interest a big breadwinner received than the average salaried worker depended on his physical details such as looks and heights.
Women also care about how a guy makes his money. Men who are lawyers, firefighters, military personnel and in health related professions (doctors and surgeons) attract more women. Guys with manufacturing jobs received fewer emails from women. Meanwhile, men are basically indifferent about women's income or profession, as long as a woman's success doesn't intimidate them. In fact, men contact female students slightly more often then women with jobs. The Columbia University study showed that men may like smart women, but not if the women appear to exceed them in intelligence or ambition.
The researchers also found an assortment of other biases that are unfortunate but unsurprising. Men turn their noses at older women, and older women turn their noses at younger men. Women prefer men with equivalent education levels, and men who have only high school diplomas avoid women who have more education. Women with children are less desirable to men, whether or not those men have kids, and childless women prefer men who don't already have kids. Women who are divorced prefer fellow divorces, whereas divorced men prefer women who have never been married.
From 'Do gentleman really prefer blondes' by Jena Pincott
