Are Women More Selective at Dating?

This was covered at LessWrong and the headline turned out to be false.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/127/an_interesting_speed_dating_stud...

See this comment from ciphergoth:

It doesn't result in a reversal of the normal results, exactly. Male sitters appear to be about as selective as female sitters, but male rotaters are much less selective than female rotaters.

And this comment from me in response:

Wow, this stuff is pretty awful. I just read the paper to verify your claim, and the paper turned out to be not any better than the NYT article: mostly composed of PC fluff about "social construction" and how "Western civilization" is this and that. The only informative part is the figure on the last page of the PDF (buried after the references, no less!) which confirms your conclusion completely, but the text doesn't even hint at it anywhere.

PDF link to the study: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-finkel/documents/Ro... .

Intuitively the cost to a guy in pre-societal times of getting a girl pregnant was negligible compared to the cost of a girl getting pregnant and as such women should be more selective.

The effect that societal influence may have had on this (the guy gets a bad reputation hurting his future chances at offspring) is something to consider but I'd doubt it's anywhere close.

Having said all that, the article does try to dispell all this by reasoning that the partner "being approached" is more selective, and that societal conditioning has led to this being the woman.

I would counter that when someone approaches in a dating scene (as in the study) they are immediately demonstrating lower value ("I have come to prove myself"). The person sitting has also established this little space as their domain, and gets to assess the value of the person coming to them. This allows for the results of the study, but also explains, in conjunction with the first theory above, why on average, even during the study, women are more selective.

Well ... I was never ...rotated at a speed dating event, but yes women are more selective. This has roots in evolution. When I choose the wrong girl my mistake might cause me losing some time. When a woman chooses the wrong man, she might be left holding the baby for years.