OkCupid Analyzes User Statistics

Women who do not hit the gym are twice as likely to have difficulty achieving orgasm than those who enjoy exercising, and students attending colleges with higher tuition show greater desire for sex than those attending schools with a less expensive price tag.

These findings—and much more data from the dating website OkCupid—are posted on the company’s blog, OkTrends.

OkTrends started in July 2009 as a forum to present interesting data the free dating website has collected from its users, said Christian T. Rudder ’97-98, editorial director and data analyst for OkCupid.

“We have a unique window into the way people are living their lives,” Rudder said. “We thought other people might be interested in what we found.”

The blog is updated about every six weeks, or “when we feel like we have something interesting to say,” the blog reads.

Its 23 posts have analyzed the ways people of different races interact with each other in the cyber world, how members of each gender perceive and rate the profile pictures of the opposite gender, as well as OkCupid users’ general online dating behavior.

“Dating is such an idiosyncratic thing,” Rudder said. “We present an analytic approach—just unbiased data.”

For example, the blog features a chart showing the correlation between women’s preference for exercising and difficulty having an orgasm by crossing the match questions, “Do you like to exercise?” and “Is it difficult for you to have an orgasm?” The same post also analyzes college tuition and the number of times a week the students would like to have sex.

“Generally speaking, the more your parents are paying for your education, the more horny you are,” Rudder writes in the blog.

Some other findings include that beer lovers are 60 percent more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they have just met; white, Asian, and Hispanic women prefer white men to all other races; and some of the biggest lies people tell in the online dating world are about their height and income.

Rudder, who has written most of the blog posts, was an English concentrator before switching to mathematics at the end of his junior year. He said his Harvard education has helped him manage the blog.

“The blog is about writing and analytics. It makes a good pair of skills,” Rudder said.

Founded by Rudder and three other Harvard graduates, OkCupid applies an algorithm to data generated by users’ responses to questions in order to determine the perfect match for those seeking heterosexual or homosexual romance.

Since its launch in 2004, OkCupid has been praised by The Boston Globe as “The Google of online dating,” and was also listed in TIME’s Valentine’s Day Top 10 Dating websites in 2007.

According to its website, OkCupid has seven million active members, while OkTrends is read by one million unique readers each month.

—Staff writer Jane Seo can be reached at janeseo@college.harvard.edu.