The key here is the number of responses. The "rate" is high (so say 70% of 25 yo males respond to 50 yo women), but the actual number of occurences is low (1% of time time messages were sent). That means 99% of messages were a more typical situation (older men, younger women).
I think a good anology is professional tennis. The claim that "older tennis players win more than younger players" would have similar graphs, since the ones that stuck around to play at 40 tend to win more than the average 20 year old tennis player. That may be true, but only because a small handful of prodigy-level tennis players (Agassi, Sampras) will remain (because they can still win) to play by the age of 40, while 10s of thousands of tennis players who are "pretty good" will be in the typical ranks of major tennis tournaments in their 20s, and phase out of the league as they age because they are no longer successful.
I think that shows that this article is a case of survivorship bias. Women who have what it takes at 50 to attract a 25 year old guy (high energy, good looks, money, personality, etc.) will do so, while 99% of women would fail, but they aren't in the measurement pool because they already figured that out 5 years ago.
One other observation, there's a big difference between "date" (which in this case probably means sleep with, since its one conversation) and "have a relationship", which is totally different. Lets see a comparison of e-harmony or match (more geared to relationships), vs "single conversation" on plenty of fish, or ok cupid (more geared to hookup culture). Or for that matter, lets see how these encounters panned out in 3 months. My guess is most 20 yo guys aren't in a long-term-relationship with 55 yo women, even if they are willing to hook up with pretty much any decent looking female.
It looks more likely to me that someone made a calculation mistake. So easy to mess up an aggregation. But IMO, if the output is unexpected it's usually because you've done it wrong rather than because you've discovered that 30 year old men secretly prefer 65 year old women :)
Did you read the article? She finds that the typical pattern of men dating younger women is true, merely that there are more exceptions than one might expect, and that older women have decent success rates with younger men. Note that "younger men respond better to older women than older men do" doesn't in the slightest imply that younger men prefer older women to younger women, or even that older women prefer older men. Despite the headline, it's not shocking. And since OkCupid publishes lots of these "response rates by category" blog articles, I'd imagine they have the math down by now. (Not that they're exactly doing statistical validation on this, but still.)
The key here is the number of responses. The "rate" is high (so say 70% of 25 yo males respond to 50 yo women), but the actual number of occurences is low (1% of time time messages were sent). That means 99% of messages were a more typical situation (older men, younger women).
I think a good anology is professional tennis. The claim that "older tennis players win more than younger players" would have similar graphs, since the ones that stuck around to play at 40 tend to win more than the average 20 year old tennis player. That may be true, but only because a small handful of prodigy-level tennis players (Agassi, Sampras) will remain (because they can still win) to play by the age of 40, while 10s of thousands of tennis players who are "pretty good" will be in the typical ranks of major tennis tournaments in their 20s, and phase out of the league as they age because they are no longer successful.
I think that shows that this article is a case of survivorship bias. Women who have what it takes at 50 to attract a 25 year old guy (high energy, good looks, money, personality, etc.) will do so, while 99% of women would fail, but they aren't in the measurement pool because they already figured that out 5 years ago.
One other observation, there's a big difference between "date" (which in this case probably means sleep with, since its one conversation) and "have a relationship", which is totally different. Lets see a comparison of e-harmony or match (more geared to relationships), vs "single conversation" on plenty of fish, or ok cupid (more geared to hookup culture). Or for that matter, lets see how these encounters panned out in 3 months. My guess is most 20 yo guys aren't in a long-term-relationship with 55 yo women, even if they are willing to hook up with pretty much any decent looking female.
