A brand new research means that a easy change to how on-line matchmaking platforms show profiles can considerably enhance consumer expertise and result in higher-quality matches.
Finding the fitting match on-line is not only a matter of algorithms. On many digital platforms, together with relationship and matrimonial companies, a extreme imbalance between the variety of customers on either side can overwhelm some individuals whereas leaving others pissed off, in the end lowering the platform’s effectiveness.
Researchers at George Mason University investigated this downside utilizing one in all India’s largest matrimonial platforms, the place males sometimes outnumber ladies by a large margin. According to Sabari Rajan Karmegam, assistant professor of data methods and operations administration on the Costello College of Business, the everyday men-to-women ratio ranges from 60:40 to as excessive as 90:10.
In a forthcoming paper printed in Information Systems Research, Karmegam and coauthors Jui Ramaprasad of the University of Maryland and Anand Gopal of Nanyang Technological University examined how this gender imbalance shapes consumer conduct and examined whether or not a easy change to the platform’s design might enhance the standard of matches for everybody.
Because the platform had way more males than ladies, males usually despatched massive numbers of invites with little selectivity in an effort to enhance their odds of matching. That created a main imbalance in incoming messages. In Karmegam’s research, ladies acquired about 40 occasions as many expressions of curiosity (EIs) as males on common.
That flood of EIs left ladies feeling “extremely overwhelmed in the initial couple of days after joining the platform,” Karmegam says. “Once they were flooded with all these requests, it was hard for them to figure out what the platform was all about. Congestion led to reduced engagement by women and potential exit from the platform. Under prevailing social norms in India, families often share in that sorting burden.” The uneven design additionally made males much less happy due to intense competitors.
Filtering modified who appeared
To enhance the expertise for either side, Karmegam and his coauthors examined “gender gating,” a course of that confirmed ladies’s profiles solely to males who met culturally acceptable standards associated to schooling, revenue, and age. For instance, the “gender gate” blocked a man in his forties from seeing profiles of ladies greater than 10 years youthful or a couple of years older than him. Women might change the default “gender-gated” settings primarily based on their very own preferences, however males couldn’t choose out of the bounds.
The experiment used two teams, one management and one remedy, every representing a state in India. The two states had been related in dimension and socioeconomic indicators and had been geographically shut, however they differed in language and cultural traits. This design decreased interference and helped isolate the impact of the intervention.
Fewer requests improved matches
Karmegam and his coauthors discovered that “gender gating” tremendously improved ladies’s platform interplay, elevated matches, and improved match high quality with out hurting male customers. It additionally led ladies to provoke extra matches as a result of they spent much less time screening for doable companions.
Compared with the management group, ladies within the remedy group acquired 6 % fewer post-intervention EIs, whereas match efficacy improved by 72 %. The paper hyperlinks this enchancment to each the decrease variety of EIs and stronger alignment with social norms.
Women over 25, who’re at prime marriageable age and subsequently align in age with extra males on the platform who’re in search of marriage, noticed a 103 % enchancment in matching efficacy. They additionally despatched 113 % extra EIs after the intervention, exhibiting larger company.
In this context, a match doesn’t imply a marriage. It means an open line of communication with a severe prospect. “Most of the conversation happens offline,” Karmegam says. “A lot of things need to happen outside the platform for things to work out, and our study does not capture that.”
Sorting might reshape platforms
The “gender gating” experiment labored so nicely that the platform expanded the intervention to its full consumer pool, Karmegam stories. With that transfer, the platform joined matchmaking companies comparable to JDate and SKY People, which use culturally applicable standards to enhance matchmaking accuracy.
Karmegam says similar interventions could apply beyond romance. “This is something that can be applied to any people-to-people matching. For example, the majority of Uber drivers are men. Parents could ask for their daughter’s Uber teen account to be ‘gender gated’, as an extra layer of protection,” he says.
Criteria-based sorting may also improve hiring in highly competitive fields such as academia. “Narrowing the search to candidates who meet specific criteria, such as schools from which the applicants might have received their PhD degrees, would help raise the effectiveness of the process,” Karmegam says.
Reference: “Gender Gating? Addressing the Impact of Congestion on the User Experience for Women in Online Matrimonial Matching Platforms” by Sabari Rajan Karmegam, Anandasivam Gopal and Jui Ramaprasad, 14 May 2026, SSRN Electronic Journal.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5254083
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