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Women are Racist
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Slate has an article with some informal data about mate preferences in a speed dating experiment with graduate and professional students.

Some of the results weren't surprising. Men apparently cared more about looks than women. And:


By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's. It isn't exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point. In a survey we did before the speed dating began, participants rated their own intelligence levels, and it turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.


You have to take this with a big ol' grain of salt, even though it rings true. Remember, they didn't actually measure intelligence. So we're talking about the subjects' perception of each other's intelligence based on only a few minutes of interaction. I'm guessing the phenomenon of sexual selection for intelligence is way more complex than what's being described here. For example, they make it sound like the men are primarily insecure about being with a woman they think is smarter than themselves. While that may be true, I've seen numerous examples of interactions where the women were equally, if not more, insecure about being the smarter person in the relationship. As a result, I wouldn't be surprised if many women in a speed dating environment didn't try to mask their intelligence to a certain extent.

Anyway, this was interesting too:


Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference.


And that makes sense as well, if we expect men in general to be less choosy about their mates than females (because they can reproduce in parallel, and have a large supply of replaceable sperm, while women can only reproduce serially and have a more limited supply and time frame in which to reproduce). So you see...women are racist! Or at least moreso than men. At least based on this little study. Except for East Asian women...why would that be the case?


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