How To Make Women Less Picky

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Short answer: Make them be the aggressors.

Jena Pincott, author of Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?, looks at a new speed-dating study which challenges some traditional assumptions about gender roles.

In speed dating, usually women sit at tables and men move from table to table at fixed intervals, doing their best to charm and whatnot. Afterward, both the men and the women write down the names of the people they’d like to see again. The matches are set up. The rub is that men tend to write down a lot more women than women write down men. Men, in short, aren’t that picky. Women… are. The usual evolutionary explanation is that mating is much higher commitment for women, who can only have so many children and who bear the burden of pregnancy, etc. They need a good mate, not just to get laid.

However, what happens when the men sit and the women go from table to table? Pincott tells it:

Psychologists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern University decided to shake things up a bit by making women rotate for a few sessions while men remained stationary. And that, according to duo, made all the difference. He found that, regardless of gender, people who were required to approach a date were less picky than people who were seated. This was extraordinary. For the first time in a dating experiment, women appeared to be no choosier than men.

One possible explanation offered by Pincott’s readers:

Women are not actually choosier than men, they say; we just have a long-standing cultural tradition for men to hit on women and women to choose whether or not to be receptive. The way to make women less picky is to make them initiators. From a psychological perspective, whoever makes the first move has more invested in a positive outcome. If it were more culturally acceptable for women to make the first move, they say, women would be less selective.

Pincott herself, however, offers this:

female rivalry (and inflated mate value).

People are attracted to those who attract others. I describe in BLONDES a few studies that found that women find a man more attractive when he’s in the company of a good-looking woman, or when he makes other women smile. This increases his so-called mate value (another tenet of sexual selection). When shown alone or paired with a woman who appears uninterested in him, the man receives lower attractiveness ratings.

I propose that women were more receptive when they are the “approachers” because they were more actively competing with the other women in the room. By circulating around the room they could see other women approaching the men they recently met. The guys seemed more attractive because so many other women appeared interested in them. While rotating men might appear desperate, seated men seem desired.

Both interpretations are possible. And I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. There’s a reason, after all, that there’s a cultural bias toward men being the pursuers. And there is, presumably, an evolutionary reason women react to competition for a man by finding him more attractive. It at least shows us that any complex social situation is not going to be reducible to crude gender stereotypes.