As the new year dawns, I – like many others – feel obliged to sign up to dating apps with the promise of a shiny new year offering romantic hope for all the singles out there. But this year, even the mere thought of rejoining them fills me with apathy.
It just seems like we’ve collectively hit a wall with dating apps (and tech in general), yearning for those IRL connections of yesteryear. Or maybe just conversation that extends past the awful salutation – ‘Hey, how are you?’ – to a complete stranger you have little interest or knowledge of yet, followed by trying to drag a two-way conversation out of people. Honestly, it’s EXHAUSTING.
I’m extra reluctant to rejoin them because of my feelings about the technology itself. In theory, dating apps should increase our chances of matching with people we wouldn’t ordinarily meet, but I know that's not what’s happening. How? I’ve experienced it first-hand in a sort of accidental experiment.
My last ‘situationship’ made me realise it was time to do the work.
A few years ago, a (white) friend and I both joined a popular dating app. We’re the same age and have similar jobs. We even did our profiles together and put in relatively similar answers. The next day, we compared our matches; she received over 30 matches on her first day on the app. In contrast, I’d had just two, who were, without wanting to disparage them, totally unsuitable. One proudly wielding a fish as his sole (LOL) picture. The other was at least 20 years older than his reported 38.
I felt so discouraged; her matches seemed much more attractive, successful and abundant. And in the moment, you can’t help but reflect that back on yourself with the inwards-looking question ‘is it me?’ My personal default is to berate my appearance, but this difference in suitors couldn’t even be attributed to a vast difference in our looks, I think most people would say we’re relatively similar on the attractiveness scales.
The difference, I now realise, was that I could have been given a lower algorithmic rating. Why would any app do that? Well, my race and my dark skin tone could have been valued as less attractive by the app’s algorithms, which has been noted as a big issue in tech, from the filters that lighten skin to the lack of inclusivity used when training algorithms.
Some apps even have ‘ethnicity filters'. For example, the dating app Hinge says it introduced such a filter due to popular demand:
“Users from minority groups are often forced to be surrounded by the majority and removing the preference option would disempower them on their dating journey. If the partner they’re looking for doesn’t fall into the majority of users, they’re seeing, their dating app experience is disheartening as they spend more time searching for someone who shares similar values and experiences…”
But in my experience, people looking for somebody from the same religion, ethnicity, or even the same interests would find an app specifically dedicated to that very purpose, like J-date, the Jewish dating app or even muddy matches – a rural dating website for those who love that country life.
There are even reports that Tinder’s algorithms give every user a ‘hot number’ rating on joining as a way to classify and match people – based on appearance and certain markers.
It’s okay to be a little preoccupied with your partner’s ex. But how you manage those insecurities makes all the difference.
Dating apps seem to suggest they pair people up with who they think will get along, but is that the case when the first marker they use to match people seems to be appearance? That’s without even factoring in racial bias; US data found that Black women and Asian men (which I believe refers to East Asian men) receive the least amount of matches. I’d imagine UK stats would mirror this too, with South Asians, the UK's biggest minority group, at the bottom alongside our Black and East Asian friends (and other minority groups.)
Perhaps this just points to the inherent racism and colonised beauty standards in the West defining people's choices. But even before we even consider that the algorithms categorise us via a hierarchy of skin colour, studies show that image recognition algorithms perform better for people with lighter skin tones than darker ones.
Practically, that might mean having fairly dark skin like mine might render you a 4/10, whilst a lighter skin tone with the same facial features could rank as a 6. Though some might say we all have a sort of ‘beauty currency’ when it comes to our appearance, with the prevalence of digital dating this number has become more important than ever before.
Back when people would meet IRL at a bar or over a desk at work, sure, your appearance might catch someone’s attention initially, but after that, your demeanour, charm and overall personality would kick in to (hopefully) back you up to seal the deal and win their affections. Hell, even your scent and pheromones might have an impact on your attractiveness. But none of that is possible to detect with a dating app. We are just pictures on a screen, a small blurb, some cold generic questions. However we feel about our appearance, whatever value we put on our looks, on a dating app, that value is being determined for us.
My ‘experiment’ was a few years ago, but I actually signed up to the dating app again recently, hoping its algorithms had become more sophisticated and inclusive. Sadly, I experienced the same thing: lacklustre dates who didn’t feel like a match for me, both in appearance, career and lifestyle. My immediate thought was that those algorithms and their racial beauty bias were still putting women/people of colour at an immediate disadvantage.
The saddest part is that it doesn’t end with dating apps either; so many platforms, from social media through to the HR software that scans people's CVs for potential employment, has been shown to have a racist bias – but despite the widespread acknowledgement of this (including research work from MIT) frankly, it seems like so little has been done to remedy it.
Practically, it feels like hacking the algorithms to try to rank higher is the only real-life solution. So I deleted the app and signed up again, firstly ticking my ethnicity as South Asian, to see the selection of men the app thought would be a good match for me. These were mostly South Asian – which is fine, I date all ethnicities – but the issue was that I had nothing in common with them. These men posed next to their flashy cars, some had very little on their profiles, some were dripping in brand logos (a personal ick that is my issue entirely).
Despite not ticking any preferences for ethnicity, I believe the algorithm had matched me with people with the same skin tone. But if I wanted an arranged marriage, I’d have let my parents set me up with somebody by now.
As a test I changed my own ethnicity to ‘white’, just to see if it altered my matches in any way. These matches now included all races, though noticeably more white men than before. And yes, I did ponder if this could be jarring to the men who ticked the ‘whites only’ box, expecting a myriad of pale-skinned people, only to be confronted with a dark-skinned Indian goth in the mix, but I’m not sure I care, just like the app developers don’t when they allegedly disadvantage people of colour from finding their partners either.
I don’t have an issue being matched with my own ethnicity or any others, my issue is that race and attractiveness – both complex and tangled topics – are being used as a primary marker for matching people on dating apps. So, should you change your ethnicity to white to have a more varied pool of dating options – that, my friends, is up to you. And it goes without saying; we shouldn’t have to do this, but what can you do when the odds are stacked against you?
I tried to hack the system another way. Western pop culture dictates that blonde hair has the highest beauty premium, and though this is a manufactured maxim – the studies trying to explain this as an intrinsic human preference are weak at best – it seems a pervasive one.
So, I wondered if changing my hair colour would push me higher up the algorithms of the app and my research led me to the work of Professor Apryl Williams, Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan.
Professor Williams explains how she and her husband matched on a dating app in a feature for Time; “He was always seeing women with blonde hair on Tinder, and he’s not really into blondes…Luckily for us, the algorithms’ tendency to stack blonde women in his swipe deck worked out in our favour because I’m a black woman who, at the time, had blonde hair.”
I do have a streak of blonde in my black hair, which looks pretty bright and bold in some pictures, so I made one of those my profile pictures to bump me up a bit further. But if I was going all in, maybe I’d wear a blonde wig and see how my matches fared – I’ll leave that experimentation choice with you.
There could be one last tactic to test, but I just couldn't bring myself to use this method. A lot of my trials – even as an experiment – go against the equality and fairness in society I believe in. But you could lighten your skin and eyes, in keeping with Eurocentric beauty standards, and see if that would give you a higher app rating, and push you further up the algorithms. But then you’re obviously misrepresenting yourself as an entirely different person and buying into the torrid system of oppression that is colourism.
The mess of bias within tech is honestly so depressing and colossal if you think about how much of an impact it has on our entire lives. I honestly loathe that I have to write this, and include anything about ‘hacking’ a system so rigged against us. On top of the often invisible and unspoken intersectional oppression people of colour deal with in society, having to try and beat an algorithm weighted against you feels both exhausting and unfair.
But the question remains: how do you fight that hidden, biased and limiting value put upon our appearance and attractiveness that is handed to us by a dating app? One that’s the result of centuries of beauty standards decided by white supremacy, all hidden within invisible algorithms, in a sunny, cheery dating app that promises so much. For now, I’m stuck trying to hack an algorithm that feels insurmountable, with an invisible ‘hotness’ score marking my every swipe.
Anita Bhagwandas is a journalist and author of UGLY: Why the world became beauty obsessed and how to break free. She writes a newsletter, The Powder Room, exploring beauty culture and history.
