FIELD NOTES · RESEARCH

Men vs women on dating apps: what the data says about who swipes, who messages and who feels safe

Men outnumber women on most dating apps, swipe more freely and wait longer for replies. Women get more attention, much of it unwanted. The evidence, and its limits.

By The On Dating Journal Editors Published 16 October 2026Updated 19 October 202612 min read

Couple talking across a table in a sunlit café

US past-year dating app users who felt each way at least sometimes (%, Pew Research Center, 2022)

Women: overwhelmed by messages54%

Men: overwhelmed by messages25%

Men: insecure about too few messages64%

Women: insecure about too few messages40%

In January 2014 one 30-year-old woman in New York received 1,504 messages on a single free dating site. That works out at roughly one every half-hour, day and night, for a month. She turned up in the data of a study by Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman of nearly 187,000 users, and she is the extreme end of a pattern that every serious piece of research on online dating keeps finding.

Men and women download the same apps and tap the same buttons. They are not having the same experience. Here is what surveys, regulators and peer-reviewed studies say about the difference, and where the evidence runs out.

Dating app gender ratio: how many men and women are swiping

Start with the head count. In its analysis of UK online dating, Ofcom found that dating apps were “significantly more popular among men”: 65 per cent of users were male and 35 per cent female. On Valentine’s Day 2024 the split among the 1.9 million British adults who visited a dating service was 61 to 39.

One app bucked it. Hinge was the only service in Ofcom’s top ten where women outnumbered men, by 53 per cent to 47. On a dating app, a balanced room is the product, and every rival would like that ratio. Our Hinge review looks at how the app is built.

Tinder’s imbalance is starker. App analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates that around three-quarters of Tinder users are men, according to Global Dating Insights’ report of a Financial Times interview with Match Group chief executive Spencer Rascoff in April 2026. Rascoff called attracting more women the “primary focus” of Tinder’s revival and said women had tired of its “quick-twitch gamified swipe mechanic”.

In the United States the gap is narrower but runs the same way. The Pew Research Center’s 2022 survey of 6,034 adults found 34 per cent of men had ever used a dating site or app, against 27 per cent of women. Among users, men were also more likely to have paid: 41 per cent had, compared with 29 per cent of women.

What men and women say they want from dating apps

Ask people why they are on the apps and the sexes agree more than the stereotypes allow. In Pew’s 2022 data there was no statistically significant gender difference in the share using apps to find a long-term partner (44 per cent of past-year users overall), for casual dating or to make friends.

The clear exception is sex. Thirty-one per cent of men said casual sex was a major reason they used dating platforms, against 13 per cent of women. Academic work points the same way. Two Tinder studies from 2016 and 2017, one of 163 Dutch users by Sumter, Vandenbosch and Ligtenberg and one of 395 young adults by LeFebvre, both found men more likely than women to use the app to seek out casual sex, as Psychology Today summarised. Yet in the Dutch study, excitement and trendiness ranked well ahead of casual sex as motives for everyone.

What people say they want in a partner is a separate question, and here behavioural data is more revealing than self-report. Economists Günter Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu and Dan Ariely estimated preferences from who users actually contacted on a dating site. Their paper, published in Quantitative Marketing and Economics in 2010, found that both sexes strongly preferred partners similar to themselves on many attributes, including race, and that women weighted income more heavily, relative to physical attributes, than men did.

The Pew Research Center’s 2019 survey of 4,860 adults adds a twist. Women who dated online were more likely than men to find it difficult to meet people they were physically attracted to (36 per cent against 21 per cent). Men were more likely to struggle to find people who shared their hobbies and interests (41 per cent against 30 per cent).

The swiping gap: what Tinder data revealed about matching

The most cited behavioural study of Tinder comes from a team of computer scientists led by Gareth Tyson. In “A First Look at User Activity on Tinder”, published in 2016, the researchers set up 14 test profiles, most of them in London, and had them like everyone within 100 miles. Between them the profiles encountered about 230,000 men and 250,000 women.

The results were lopsided. The male test profiles matched about 0.6 per cent of the time; the female profiles matched at around 10 per cent, as MIT Technology Review reported. In a companion survey, 59 per cent of women said they liked 10 per cent or fewer of the profiles they saw. Only 9 per cent of men said the same.

After the match, the roles reversed. Twenty-one per cent of the women who matched with the researchers’ male profiles went on to send a message, against 7 per cent of the men who matched with the female profiles. Of the men’s first messages, 63 per cent arrived within five minutes of matching, compared with 18 per cent of women’s. The median message from a man was 12 characters long. The median from a woman was 122.

The authors proposed a feedback loop: men who get few matches become less selective, and women flooded with matches become choosier still. It is a hypothesis rather than a proven mechanism, but it fits what users on both sides report.

Desirability and messaging: the Bruch and Newman hierarchy

Bruch and Newman’s paper, published in Science Advances in 2018, used messaging data from four US cities (New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle) over January 2014. They ranked users by desirability, defined not by looks but by how many messages a person received and from whom.

Their headline finding was that most people aim up. On average users contacted partners about 25 per cent more desirable than themselves: men 26 per cent higher and women 23 per cent, according to Medical Xpress’s report of the study. The further up the scale they reached, the less likely a reply became. For men writing to women more desirable than themselves, reply rates never rose above 21 per cent.

The hierarchy had a clear shape by age and education. Women’s desirability, as measured, was highest at 18 and declined steadily until about 60. Men’s peaked at around 50. More education always raised a man’s desirability; for women, an undergraduate degree scored highest and postgraduate study was associated with lower desirability, even after controlling for age.

Longer messages paid off only for women and for men in Seattle, which the researchers called “the most unfavorable dating climate for men”. Bruch’s advice was brisk: “it might pay to be persistent.”

Overwhelmed or ignored: how the sexes experience online dating

Surveys capture the human side of those numbers. In Pew’s 2022 data, 54 per cent of women who had used apps in the past year said they had felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received, against 25 per cent of men. Sixty-four per cent of men had felt insecure about how few messages they got, against 40 per cent of women. Our report on dating app fatigue traces how that asymmetry wears both groups down.

The 2019 survey framed it more bluntly. Fifty-seven per cent of male online daters said they had not received enough messages; 30 per cent of women said they had received too many, against 6 per cent of men.

Unsurprisingly, the overall verdicts differ. In Pew’s 2023 report, 57 per cent of men who had used online dating described their experience as positive, compared with 48 per cent of women.

Harassment and safety on dating apps: a gendered risk

The sharpest difference is not in matches but in harm. Among US women under 50 who had used dating platforms, Pew found that 56 per cent had been sent sexually explicit messages or images they did not ask for. Forty-three per cent said someone kept contacting them after they said they were not interested, 37 per cent had been called an offensive name and 11 per cent had been threatened with physical harm. Pew says women were more likely than men to report each of these.

The 2019 survey found the youngest women most exposed. Among women aged 18 to 34, 60 per cent reported continued unwanted contact and 57 per cent unsolicited explicit images; 19 per cent had been threatened with physical harm, roughly twice the rate of men the same age.

Men face a different threat. Sixty-three per cent of male online daters under 50 told Pew they thought they had come across a scammer, compared with 44 per cent of women of any age. Romance fraud figures, covered in our romance scam statistics report, show how costly that can be.

Perceptions of safety follow experience. Among people who had dated online, 41 per cent of women said it was not a safe way to meet people, against 23 per cent of men. Australian research suggests the problem is not confined to America. A national survey of almost 10,000 dating app users in 2021, published by the Australian Institute of Criminology, found three in four had experienced sexual violence facilitated by dating apps in the previous five years, with LGBTIQ+ users reporting it much more often than heterosexual participants. Only 8.3 per cent of those harassed online reported it to police.

Sexuality cuts across gender here. Pew found 64 per cent of lesbian, gay and bisexual users had experienced at least one form of harassment, against 45 per cent of straight users.

Same apps, different rules: how the platforms are responding

The industry has noticed. Match Group’s shareholder letter for the fourth quarter of 2025 credited Tinder’s improving trends to “our increased focus on improving the experience for women”, including tests of AI recommendation algorithms that change the order of profiles shown to women. The same letter said Face Check, Tinder’s video-selfie verification, had cut interactions with bad actors by more than half, according to the company.

Bumble went the other way on one of its founding ideas. In August 2026 it dropped the rule that only women could send the first message, citing a company survey in which 66 per cent of women said they preferred men to make the first move. The figure is the company’s own, but the change admits that the original fix did not suit everyone. Our Bumble review covers how the app now works.

What the research cannot tell us

Much of the best evidence is narrower than its headlines. Bruch and Newman removed gay and bisexual users, about 14 per cent of the site’s members, and studied four coastal cities in one month of 2014, on a site whose users skewed white, educated and well-off. Tyson’s team used 14 test profiles on a single app. Desirability scores measure attention received, not worth.

Surveys rely on what people choose to report, and “overwhelmed” is subjective. Most studies treat gender as binary and dating as heterosexual, so they say little about women dating women, men dating men or non-binary users; our HER review and Grindr review cover apps built for them. And apps change faster than journals: a 2016 Tinder study describes a product that has since been rebuilt many times over.

What survives the caveats is a consistent picture. On the big heterosexual apps, men are more numerous, less selective and starved of replies; women are scarcer, choosier, flooded with attention and far more likely to be harassed. To compare how individual apps handle these pressures, see our guide to the best dating apps.

Frequently asked questions

Are there more men than women on dating apps?

Yes, on most of them. Ofcom found 65 per cent of UK dating app users were men, and Sensor Tower estimates about three-quarters of Tinder users are male. Hinge was the only top-ten UK service with more women than men.

Do men or women get more matches on dating apps?

Women, by a wide margin. In a 2016 study of Tinder, test male profiles that liked everyone nearby matched about 0.6 per cent of the time, while test female profiles matched at around 10 per cent.

Why do men get fewer replies on dating apps?

Research suggests it is partly numbers and partly strategy. Men outnumber women, like more profiles and tend to message people rated more desirable than themselves. Bruch and Newman found reply rates for men writing to more desirable women never exceeded 21 per cent.

Are dating apps less safe for women?

Women report far more harassment. Pew found 56 per cent of US women under 50 who had dated online had received unsolicited explicit images, and 41 per cent of women online daters said it was not a safe way to meet people, against 23 per cent of men.

Do men and women want different things from dating apps?

Less than people assume. Pew found no significant gender gap in using apps to find a long-term partner, but men were more than twice as likely as women to cite casual sex as a major reason (31 per cent against 13 per cent).