‘80% Of Women Are Only Attracted To The Top 20%’ Of Men? Made-Up Pop Science Is Making Men Miserable

Perhaps for the first time in history, we’re seeing a curious spike in male preoccupation with vanity, known as “looksmaxxing.” The idea is that there’s no single more important metric that can improve your status in society, how well you do with women, how successful you become, how people treat you, and so on, than how attractive your appearance is. In that sense, looksmaxxers unironically advise, “If you’re a man in your 20s, start looksmaxxing, go into debt if you have to.” But is the halo effect really that strong, or are there other confounding variables at play?

Looksmaxxing influencers like Clavicular, as well as incels and even some broad sociosexual coalitions along the red pill and manosphere spectrum, are starting to accept the great lie that women only want a Chad, so any average guy doesn’t stand a chance. They come prepared with charts and graphs and pop science so ubiquitous they’ve turned into memes.

How could it not be true if there’s an oft-repeated statistic? “80% of women are only attracted to the top 20% of men.” This is often used as evidence for the blackpill: the belief that looks are genetically determined and that women choose sexual partners based solely on physical features, so whether or not a person will be an incel is predetermined. By extension, it implies men only have two choices: go all-in on looksmaxxing or resign yourself to inceldom. But it’s a misunderstanding of the data, leading to an inflated sense of doom where there need not be.

This stat is so commonly repeated without scrutiny that most don’t even know where it comes from and attempt to over-extrapolate the data beyond its scope. The data comes from a since-deleted 2009 OkCupid blog, which revealed the women surveyed rated 80% of men on the platform as “below average” in attractiveness, while men’s ratings of women were more evenly distributed. This data comes from outdated in-house OkCupid blogs (“OkTrends”) whose links no longer exist, not from rigorous scientific study.

Interestingly, the 80/20 finding did not come from women’s swipe data, but rather from how they ranked men on an attractiveness scale of 0 to 5. While women were harsher critics when it came to determining “average attractiveness,” they still messaged men across the distribution. Men, by contrast, were more charitable in rating women’s attractiveness but overwhelmingly messaged the most attractive women.

The data actually vindicate assortative mating and radical honesty in self-assessment. The blog found, “The average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.” Most ironically, this blog, responsible for the 80/20 talking point parroted in manosphere circles to vindicate the idea that women are only attracted to Chads, says, “This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.”

Meanwhile, when the most attractive men messaged the least attractive women, their reply rates dropped sharply, suggesting that women were not punishing attractive men but were reluctant to engage with partners they perceived as far outside their own attractiveness range. These findings have been replicated in more recent studies, such as a 2018 study that found both men and women reach slightly upward in the dating market, known as “aspirational pursuit of mates,” by messaging people about 25% higher in desirability than themselves, but reply rates are much more assortative.

The data comes from a since-deleted 2009 OkCupid blog, which revealed the women surveyed rated 80% of men on the platform as “below average” in attractiveness, while men’s ratings of women were more evenly distributed.

The wider the desirability gap in either direction, the sharper the drop in replies. So, shooting too high or too low reduces success, while reciprocity is most rewarded with mates of comparable desirability (assortative mating). The study concludes online dating differs from offline dating in several important ways, all of which suggest that hierarchies of desirability may be more pronounced online than offline.

The OkCupid blog is sometimes conflated with another unrigorous anonymous blog based on Tinder data collected by a man who sampled 27 women from his writer’s friend group. The sample size is far too small, unrepresentative, and biased to be considered real quantitative research. Nonetheless, he deduced from his data of 27 women whom he personally knew that 80% of them only liked the top 20% of attractive men, and the rest of us have been forced to reckon with this pop science ever since. People often extrapolate these unscientific findings beyond their narrow scope, claiming that 80% of women in general are only attracted to the top 20% of men.

Here are a few things we do know: women are more selective, not just on the apps but in the “sexual marketplace” in general, because the cost is higher for them, seeing as it can result in pregnancy. When you’re using the apps, women become even more selective, and everyone places inflated importance on looks because of the nature of the app. Women don’t write off 80% of all men, but the numbers might appear that way on dating apps for a few reasons.

Let’s first remember that swiping on an app is just a filtering mechanism for a market where women are overloaded with options. The gender ratio is skewed in women’s favor because the majority of people on dating apps are men, often at a two-to-one or even three-to-one ratio. This is why men typically play the numbers game, indiscriminately swiping right on virtually every woman that pops up, while women can afford to have their pick of the litter. Evolutionarily, men are incentivized to cast a wider net to secure as many chances to mate as possible, while women, because of their vulnerability to pregnancy as well as sexual assault, will optimize for quality upfront.

It’s an inherently superficial way of meeting partners, at least in terms of filtering who you’re willing to entertain. Dating apps are looks-forward first. If you don’t pass that bar, you’re not getting a match. Both men and women consistently rank women as more attractive than men, and some suggest this is because women spend more time on their appearance. A recent study on Tinder profiles and matches found that beyond mere judgments of physical attractiveness, another evaluative dimension underlying swiping decisions was moral character judgments.

A 2023 study on women’s perceptions of male self-representation on a dating app (Tinder) found that women base their matches on perceived attractiveness, a nice personality, and trustworthiness. The researchers analyzed the ratio between swipes right and left, both in general and separately for each respondent and profile. Though they found that women are quite selective (swiping right 30% of the time on average), there’s individual variation. Some women are hyper-selective, with around 20% of respondents rejecting more than 80% of profiles.

Some of the biggest reasons women swiped left were large age gaps and poor photos. Among the bottom 10% of male profiles that were rejected, the majority involved pictures that obscured the man’s face. When a face could be seen, 60% had strange or unfriendly facial expressions, and 20% had excessive photo editing. The findings also confirmed that personality is a factor, showing that profiles with text descriptions received many more matches.

Some women have anecdotally reported a lack of attraction to static images, and research supports this as well. Women’s attraction is more context-dependent, which perhaps explains why dating apps are incredibly frustrating for men (because they don’t get matches) and women (because they don’t find many people attractive). The real issue is that the signals women look for in a partner that attract them are largely excluded here.

Men respond more to sexually explicit visual cues on average, while women are more tied to context, narrative, and non-visual features. Likewise, the Tinder study found that “women use every possible cue (background, pose, angle, facial expression) from the photo to construct a narrative and form an impression about the man.” These are details that men might not consider when constructing their profiles.

They aren’t able to experience a man’s facial expressions in motion, his tone of voice, his smell, as well as his status and the type of man he is. When people used to hang out in groups and meet each other in relational contexts, women already had a good idea of where a man ranked in the hierarchy, who he was, how he behaved, his attributes, and what other people thought of him. With one or a few static images, men’s most attractive qualities to women become flattened.

As a scientist studying human mating behavior, Macken Murphy summarizes, “Women are more selective to begin with, the apps are mostly dudes, and the game is mostly about looks, and women look better.” The good news? What makes men attractive to women is much more subjective than what makes them unattractive. According to that same study on online dating profile swiping behavior, it’s easier to predict which profiles will be rejected than which ones will be accepted. That is, only one out of 100 profiles was liked by more than 80% of participants, but 38 profiles were disliked by the same 80%.

There aren’t universal rules for attraction, but we have fairly reliable models for what will make you unattractive. Besides the aforementioned age gap and poor photo quality issues, women also reacted negatively to “flexing,” despite men’s belief that showing off their muscles is an effective strategy. In this context, which only surveyed a Korean population, it was perceived negatively because women associated it with low intelligence, potential aggression, and seeking casual sex. Women also responded quite negatively to financial flexing in the form of out-of-context photos of expensive items.

There aren’t universal rules for attraction, but we have fairly reliable models for what will make you unattractive.

So, if you’re a man on the apps struggling to get messages, don’t despair. There’s a good chance you’re making one of these easy-to-fix mistakes. Make sure you take flattering photos that don’t obscure your face. Avoid being the guy who only posts photos of himself in a group, and anecdotally, being the guy holding a fish is like female repellent on dating apps, unless you’re looking for a very niche country girl match who might be into it. Be savvy with your photos. If you have non-physical attractive qualities, you can include them in your photos with subtlety, and subtlety is important here, not just a photo of a Rolex, effectively improving your attractiveness to women and communicating that you are socially sophisticated, which will make you more intriguing.

Cross-culturally, men who are muscular and more bodily masculine have higher mating success than men who aren’t, and one theory is that, in terms of female attraction, it’s better to be scary than hot. While men do tend to overestimate the extent to which women find muscularity attractive (men tend to think extremely muscular men will be more attractive to women, though this has diminishing returns), having some muscle is generally preferable to having none. If you’re not all that attractive, you might have more success approaching women in real life compared to the apps, or you might need to spend more time adding extraneous context clues that increase your perceived attractiveness through status signals.

Remember that despite women judging men’s looks more harshly, men’s behavior is more strongly driven by women’s looks than the reverse. Women’s reply behavior is more assortative than men’s, meaning they’re more likely to reciprocate interest from men similar to them in perceived desirability rather than favoring the most attractive man. Don’t get me wrong: women definitely care about looks, and they even care about them more than they explicitly state, according to studies, but they care about them proportionately, about the same as men.

Above all, keep an optimistic attitude without expectations and maintain perspective. The current dating market is difficult to navigate, but it’s not all bad. As Macken Murphy astutely points out, you don’t have any meaningful frame of reference for what dating was truly like in the past. What makes you think it was any easier? For all of the difficulties introduced by online technologies, they’ve also provided considerable benefits, like globalization, enabling people to partner with mates who are maximally compatible with them.

For most of human evolution, we lived in hunter-gatherer groups. Murphy presents this thought experiment: “In these settings, how many women would you know? How many women would you know in your age range? How many in your age range are single? When you keep trimming down the specifics, the final tally of potential suitors you could marry and reproduce with is vanishingly small, and so too are the odds these women would be your most attractive and compatible options.” Today, you can have a genuinely good shot at meeting someone who meets your standards across multiple criteria, rather than simply being the person who happened to be there.