http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4015
One social science finding which I’ve wondered about over the past few years is the result that women care much more about the race of a potential mate than men do. The fact that individuals tend to want to mate assortatively with those who share their characteristics is no surprise. Rather, what does surprise are a series of papers that show a strong asymmetry in strength of preference between males and females. To be crass about it, an attractive warm body will do for a man, but women strongly prefer a body with the packaging of their own race!
First, let’s keep this in perspective, here are the correlations from the GSS for married individuals for several variables of note (I’ve filtered for whites here):
Ethnicity – 0.40
Highest Degree – 0.55
Socioeconomic index – 0.32
I think it’s interesting to note that the variable which reveals meritocratic achievement has the highest correlation. Ethnicity is something you’re born into, and socioeconomic index is a metric which derives from the milieu in which you were raised.This post is going to review some findings in a paper which attempts to both describe the differences in race preference for dating by race and across genders, and, why those differences might emerge the way that they do. The paper is Racial Preferences in Dating, Review of Economic Studies. Here’s the abstract:
“We examine racial preferences in dating. We employ a Speed Dating experiment that allows us to directly observe individual decisions and thus infer whose preferences lead to racial segregation in romantic relationships. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. The richness of our data further allows us to identify many determinants of same-race preferences. Subjects’ backgrounds, including the racial composition of the ZIP code where a subject grew up and the prevailing racial attitudes in a subject’s state or country of origin, strongly influence same-race preferences. Older subjects and more physically attractive subjects exhibit weaker same-race preferences.”
A few points need to be made clear: males do not exhibit statistically significant racial preferences by and large. That’s somewhat shocking to me. I’m not surprised that older subjects have weaker biases, I suspect frankly they’re more realistic and don’t want to narrow their options anymore than they have to. Finally, I’m totally confused as to why hotties would be less race conscious; you would figure if hybrid vigor is real that the marginal returns would be greatest for the fuglies (specifically, assuming that fugitude correlates with individual mutational load and hybridization would be better at masking that load). But the most relevant demographic point is that these are Columbia University graduate students. In other words, a cognitively & socially elite sample.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/07/why_does_race_matter_for_women.php