Online dating has unexpected influence on wealth gaps, research paper finds

From heartstrings to purse strings, online dating has changed the way we think about love and culture, but what if it's also changing the way we think about money?

A recent paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis and Haverford College found that online dating may have contributed to an uptick in income inequality in the U.S. over recent decades as an increasing number of people swipe left on potential mates who don't meet their criteria in select areas.

"Since the emergence of dating apps that allow people to look for a partner based on criteria including education, Americans have increasingly been marrying someone more like themselves. That accounts for about half of the rise in income inequality among households between 1980 and 2020," the researchers found, according to a report from Bloomberg.

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Researchers pulled data from 2008 to 2021 using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to assess changes in the ways men and women selected potential partners in the online dating age.

According to Bloomberg's report, these researchers found that women became more selective in terms of age while men became more selective in terms of education.

"But when the researchers compared that with data on married couples from 1960 and 1980, they found that people in the recent period increasingly went for partners with the same wage and education levels. And while many people married someone of the same ethnicity, people became less and less selective on race over time," the article continued.

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As people in similar income brackets continue to marry, households are less likely to have one low-income earner and one high-income earner and instead have partners belonging to similar income brackets.

Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría, economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote more about the research in a blog post earlier this month, explaining that the assessment targeted specific areas such as "to what extent people prefer someone like themselves," "how selective (picky) people are when searching for a potential partner" and "how income inequality has been affected by the degree of selectivity of people," to name a few.

Data indicated that online dating raised the Gini Coefficient – a popular measure used to assess income inequality – by three percentage points, the report found.

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"We find that the corresponding changes in mate preferences and increased assortativeness by skill and education over this timeframe account for about half of the increased income inequality among households," the researchers stated in part.

They added in the conclusion, "We find that the increase in income inequality over the past half a century is explained to a large extent by sorting on vertical characteristics, such as income and skill, and their interaction with education."

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