A Good Man Is Getting Even Harder to Find

choi

Gerard Baker (WSJ's editor a large), A Good Man Is Getting Even Harder to Find; The future of mating looks grim as more educated women compete for fewer eligible males. Wall Street Journa;. Oct 5, 2019.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-g ... to-find-11570200829
("According to the US Department of Education, more than 57% of the class of 2018 who graduated with bachelor's degrees were female. The gap for master's degrees was even wider: 59% to 41%.  This gender imbalance has existed since 1981, when more women than men graduated for the first time, and it's widened just about every single year since then. * * * If education really is the key to lifetime earning potential, then slowly, perhaps, steadily, we can expect the gap in pay and opportunities to narrow. * * * It is estimated that for every three men with bachelor's degrees in their 20s and 30s, there are now four women.

My comment:
(a) "When my daughters were small they had a favorite bit of doggerel that prefigured some early feminist leanings. * * * I'd try to take issue with the grammatical betise"
(i) doggerel (mass noun; apparently from dog (used contemptuously, as in dog Latin [a debased form of Latin]) + -rel):
"comic verse composed in irregular rhythm"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/doggerel

Compare ditty (n; ultimately from Latin noun neuter dictātum something dictated, from [verb] dictare to dictate): "a short, simple song"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/ditty
(ii) prefigure (vt): "be an early indication or version of (something)"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/prefigure

The definition in www.merriam-webster.com is "to show, suggest, or announce by an antecedent type, image, or likeness."
(iii) bêtise (n; etymology: French noun feminine bête beast, animal)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/betise'\
(b) "Aviv Goldgeier, an engineer with the dating app Hinge, was recently interviewed about data he'd compiled on the 'likes' of straight men and women. If we think of attractiveness in terms of  * * * It turns out that the Gini index for males is 0.542—a high level of inequality. A small number of men hold most of the attractiveness assets. For women, in the eyes of men, the attractiveness assets were much more evenly spread—a Gini index of just 0.376. Grim confirmation: A much smaller number of men are considered eligible by women than is the case for women as viewed by men."
(i) Aviv Goldgeier has a personal website
http://www.avivgoldgeier.com/#!/
, which describes this young man (himself) this way:

"I am a musician, music technologist, and data scientist based out of New York City. I received my Bachelor's in Music Technology from NYU in May 2016 with an honors minor in Computer Science. While there, I spent the last couple years engaged in research involving Digital Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and Music Information Retrieval. I am currently employed as a Data Engineer at Hinge."

I am kind of doubtful of credential, but his data is simple, no need for rocket scientists to understand.
(ii) The link to "recently interviewed" in the WSJ report is disconnected. I locate and introduce it as (a), which is undated but several reports talked about it in 2017.
(A) What's The Biggest Challenge Men Face On Dating Apps?: A Q&A With Aviv Goldgeier, Junior Growth Engineer. Hinge IRL, undated
https://hingeirl.com/hinge-repor ... or-growth-engineer/
("On Hinge, men send a first like more than three times as often as women. But more than that, when women do initiate, they tend to do so on a smaller segment of the male population. For example, while about half of all likes [from men] sent to women go to about 25 percent of women, half of all likes sent to men go to a much smaller segment – about 15 percent. * * * So that's the biggest problem men face on dating apps – the Brad Pitts of the world take the lion's share of the likes from an already like-deficient sex [women]. * * * The most attractive women on Hinge [by the criterion that those who receives the most likes] do not actually form the most connections [agreed on by both parties]. In fact, straight women who receive incoming likes at around the 80th percentile have the most connections with men, about 27 percent more than our most-liked women")

What is IRL? See Simon Edmunds, Hinge Launches New Digital Media Magazine IRL, Giving Advice & Insights On Modern Dating. GDI ("About" in the site says the acronym means "Global Dating Insights"), Apr 26, 2017
https://www.globaldatinginsights ... s-on-modern-dating/
("Hinge is following the lead of Grindr [for gay people] with the launch of a new digital media platform called IRL, which gives advice and insights to modern daters.  IRL, which stands for “in real life”, is a new online magazine from the New York dating business that launched yesterday")

What was Goldgeier saying?  Honestly, I did not know. So I delve deeper. He did not show original data. But another reports -- (B) -- cited more of his (or Hinge's data) which illuminates Goldgeier's point.
(B) Dan Kopf, These Statistics Show Why It's So Hard to Be an Average Man on Dating Apps. Quartz, Aug 15, 2017
https://qz.com/1051462/these-sta ... man-on-dating-apps/
(" (Unlike swipe-based Tinder, Hinge is based on a system of 'liking' some particular aspect of a person’s profile.)" )

I have never had a smart phone -- hence the experience of using dating apps. I imagine Hinge is the same as Tinder, both being photo-based. I view the screenshots of Hinge, which have small-letter words in a profile, but likely Hinge users do not pay much attention to words.

Looking at the table, I would urge caution in interpreting it. Dating apps are necessarily appearance-based, whose users most likely selects on ground appearance alone. But in real world, there are other aphrodisiac: such as wealth (for golddiggers) and power ("Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac": Henry Kissinger).
(iii) Return to the WSJ article. What does its second half say? I was confused then, which becomes clearer after reading blogs about Goldgeiger. My conclusion is the WSJ article misunderstood Goldgeier's comments.  We a;; know dating apps does not include income or wealth in individual profiles, but most likely Gerard Baker thinks opposite, in the belief that Goldgeier''s use of Gini index means income or wealth in Hinge profiles.
(iv) Then consider the plight of black women. They are highly educated. But, compared with white women, black women have fewer qualified men to choose from (in prison, less educated, unwilling to stick around to provide for the family). So black women choose white men in droves, such as Cassie. Diddy's ex.