Are Women In Charge Of The Dating Market? - Jon Birger

A woman met a guy who's five foot nine at a party and brilliant and funny and handsome. She's not gonna notice that he's five foot nine. But when it comes down to putting a number on a screening function on a dating app, people start treating dating like shopping. (air whooshing)

John Berger, welcome to the show.

Chris, thanks for having me on the podcast.

Talk to me about how you ended up as an authority on the dating market.

Well, authority may be a bit strong, but- but yeah, th- this is the first question I typically get, which is basically, how the heck did a- a business journalist, a writer for Fortune Magazine ever end up writing a book about dating? And the answer is basically the ... It actually has a lot to do with- with my years at Fortune Magazine. The editorial staff at Fortune was more women than men, but it was one of these things where I couldn't help but notice that most of the men at Fortune were either married, like myself, or involved in long-term relationships. Whereas the women, especially the ones I seemed to know best and I was friends with, they were disproportionately single. And they weren't just single, they had all these dating horror stories and dating histories that- that made no sense to me. Especially since, from my perspective, a lot of them seemed to have way more going for them dating-wise than we guys did. Um, so the- the origin of my first book, Dateanomics, was basically just trying to explain how we got to a world in which dating had become so much easier for men than for women.

What was the summary of what you found out during that research?

So initially, I thought this had something to do with the job markets in- in these really cosmopolitan cities like New York or London or Toronto, LA. Like I thought there was something about the- the industries, the job markets in these cities that was drawing more women, particularly college-educated women, um, to these cities than- than men. And that was- that was my premise for Dateanomics, but it turns out I was wrong. That this is not a- a big city versus small town problem. This is an everywhere issue. So basically, in every Western country and in many non-Western countries as well, over the past 20, 30 years, we've had about one-third more women than men graduate from college or graduate from- from uni as you may call it, you know, overseas (laughs) . Um, uh, and as a result, you end up with a dating pool after college that has, you know, one-third more women than men. And obviously, this wouldn't matter at all if we were more open-minded about whom we date and eventually marry, but at the same time that- that- that this higher education gender imbalance has been- become wider and wider, there's been a- a simultaneous increase in what academics refer to as assortative mating, which is just a fancy way of saying that university grads tend to want to date and marry other university grads.