Women don’t make first move in online dating

Men, take note! Women tend to send “weak signals” rather than making the first move when it comes to online dating, researchers, including those of Indian-origin, have found. “Women don’t like to send personal messages to initiate contact,” said Jui Ramaprasad, an assistant professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.

In other words, “we still see that women don’t make the first move,” she said.

Instead, they tend to send what the researchers call a “weak signal”.

Weak signalling is the ability to visit, or “check out,” a potential mate’s profile so the potential mate knows the focal user visited, researchers said.

In a large-scale experiment conducted through a major North American online dating website, researchers examined the impact of a premium feature: anonymous browsing.

Out of 100,000 randomly selected new users, 50,000 were given free access to the feature for a month, enabling them to view profiles of other users without leaving telltale digital traces. Compared to the control group, users with anonymous browsing viewed more profiles. They were also more likely to check out potential same-sex and interracial matches.

However, users who browsed anonymously also wound up with fewer matches (defined as a sequence of at least three messages exchanged between users) than their non-anonymous counterparts.

This was especially true for female users: those with anonymous browsing wound up with an average of 14 per cent fewer matches. “The offline ‘flirting’ equivalents, at best, would be a suggestive look or a preening bodily gesture such as a hair toss to one side or an over-the-shoulder glance, each subject to myriad interpretations and possible misinterpretations contingent on the perceptiveness of the players involved,” researchers said.