Swiping dating app profiles goes beyond figuring out who gives you the ick — it may also encourage wealth disparity.
Nearly 60 million Americans report using dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, where you can filter by age, career, education, and other marketable traits.
But using the apps to find the ‘one’ means you could be contributing to income inequality, according to research from the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and Dallas and Haverford College.
Researchers found that at least half of the rise in income inequality between 1980 and 2020 is attributable to changing preferences in the online dating scene. People are now even more likely to marry someone of a similar socioeconomic level — lawyers marrying bankers, truck drivers marrying plumbers etc.
The research looked at survey data from 2008 to 2021 – the period when dating apps like Tinder became the most common way to meet other singles – to track the education, race, income, skill level and age of recently married people.