Credits: Social Media
Online dating is harder for dark-skinned people, study reveals
Daters with darker skin consistently receive a penalty in comparison to those with lighter skin, suggesting colorism can have a direct impact on how dark-skinned Black people navigate their romantic lives, according to a study due for publication in November 2024.
Different strokes for different folks. But many things are harder for some people than for others, and nowhere is that truer than in relationships. Anxious people are more likely to read negatively into dating than non-anxious people. And now this, as if we needed any more evidence of racial inequality and injustice.
Dark-skinned daters get the raw end of the deal
For many reasons, its hard to establish causal relationships between things like skin color, interpersonal connections, and (dis)advantage.
However, based on a survey experiment featuring online dating profiles of Black daters of varying skin shades, one Texas professor claims to have found that the (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc.) profiles of dark-skinned daters consistently receive a penalty in comparison to profiles of light- and medium-skinned people.
She concludes, based on her research, that dark-skinned Black people are directly impacted by colorism when using online dating apps, and navigating their romantic lives in more general ways.
Dark skin color consistently [&] has lower log-odds of receiving a positive rating when compared to the light and medium shades, she writes. Meanwhile and this is interesting there are no statistically significant differences between light-skinned and medium-skinned daters.
This means, at least to the extent that the research is robust and reliable, it is only Black people with very dark skin who experience this particular disadvantage when swiping (or getting swiped) on apps like Tinder and Hinge. Black people with medium skin don’t appear to be affected by colorism in dating environments in the same way, relative to Black people with lighter skin.
Why the phenomenon of colorism is more noticeable in online dating
When we swipe on apps like Bumble and Tinder, we are usually alone. There is no accountability we dont need to explain to anyone why were swiping left or right. Dating apps work by removing social pressures from the matching environment.
One can see that this brings with it certain advantages. For socially anxious or otherwise unconfident people, dating apps provide a way of flirting with the idea of dating without diving straight in. They also allow us to think about what we like and don’t like, without having to make major decisions right away.
In her introduction to the research paper described above, Emilce Santana puts it this way: There is little accountability or social pressure to behave in a particular way.
Online dating is low-stakes, perhaps more so than other types of dating because the online aspect creates a level of distance that is not present in face-to-face interactions.
This means its possible to glean from the data the unadulterated pervasiveness of colorism, she says, as well as other social phenomena. “Having dark skin color puts profiled people at a consistent disadvantage.”
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