CMV: There is no credible evidence for the 80/20 rule
There is a common belief that in today's dating world, 80% of women are chasing the top 20% of men (or varying percentages to indicate the vast majority of women are chasing a small, top percentage of men). It comes from red pill ideology but has spread disturbingly far into mainstream discourse.
The frequent claim is that this is backed up by "dating app data," but this is untrue. Pressing for this data inevitably results in one of three replies:
OKCupid survey This survey done back in 2009 by OKCupid found that the mean rating of men's profiles by women put 80% of them as "below average" or worse. But, in the very same graph, it also shows that 80% of messages sent from women were to the bottom 92% of men.
The real kicker is that the same survey found that 2/3 of messages sent from men were to the top 1/3 of women. It basically says the exact opposite of what red pill claims.
Tinder "Experiment" blog posts There's a bunch of these but this particular blog post is the most common one. These "experiments" claim to scientifically prove the 80/20 rule, but they're literally just blog posts that very frequently provide no data to back up their claim, to say nothing of the incredibly flawed methodology.
Statistics that don't actually say anything about the 80/20 rule There are a few varieties of these, the most common one right now is "women only swipe right on 5% of men!"
Yes, but it does not say that women only swipe right on the same 5% of men.
Where is this data?