Maria Mężykowska

If I told you to Imagine a situation where a man and a woman are at a bar and one approaches the other, you might assume that the man is the one who initiates the encounter. This is largely due to cultural norms and expectations towards dating; men are expected to approach women first. This is also connected to things as innocent as school dances. In the US and Canada, there is an event called the Sadie Hawkins Dance. The main point of the ball is for the girls to ask the boys out. Moreover, it is an opportunity to  break social norms.

A study conducted by Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. and published in Science of Relationships in 2013 explored a  Sadie Hawkins-like scenario. The main purpose of the experiment was to investigate the consequence of a role swap in speed dating. Even though it is common knowledge what speed dating is, let me present a short definition. According to the Cambridge Dictionary speed dating is “[A] way of meeting people for possible romantic relationships that involves talking with a lot of people for a short time to see if you like them”. It allows daters to meet a lot of people more quickly. Women sit in place, while men move from one female to another. Prior research indicated that in regular speed dating women tend to be pickier about men with whom they talked. In this experiment women and men swapped roles: The men sat in the room while women rotated and approached different potential partners. The main objectives of the study were to determine whether females behave differently when they are placed in the “typical” situation of a male, and if being picky in dating is dependent on one’s gender, or rather the role one plays in the dynamic between potential partners. The researchers hypothesized that with the role swap would come a “behavior swap”. 

300 undergraduates took part in the study with half of them being the control group and participating in the regular speed-dating round. The other 150 took part in the round, where the roles of men and women were exchanged. The results confirmed the researcher’s hypothesis. In the standard „man-rotating”, men indicated an interest in half of the women, whilst women showed interest in roughly a third of men. However, in the Sadie Hawkins-like variation, women were less picky than their control group counterparts, and men who were in the position of the selector tended to be pickier about their potential partner than those who sat in place during their round. To quote the study: “These findings show how widely assumed gender difference is. Women are picky about who they date, men aren’t- this could largely be an artifact of social situations.” The researchers also claimed that this research shows how careful we must be to avoid assumptions about gender differences, and how we may not need to look far and wide for other potential explanations.

The study investigates a fascinating phenomenon; nevertheless, I do not agree completely with the conclusions drawn from the data. Even in real-life situations where women are put in the exact same position as men, such as dating apps, data shows that females are still more selective. The author ought to be more careful about implying a causal relationship in an observational study. Far too little emphasis was placed on potential other factors, which could have influenced the subjects’ behavior. For example, a gain in confidence could come as a result of the attention received while being in the position of the selector.