When it comes to looking for love, it’s more common now than ever to download a dating app and hope you’ll stumble across your future soulmate with a simple swipe right. However, Black folks, women especially, have a harder time than most with the least amount of matches and most amount of rejections. One Black woman on TikTok might’ve just discovered the reason why, and it could be systemic.
Recently on the social media app, an experiment done by user @cityvibeswithMarie, a 36-year-old woman who has been posting about her experience with online dating, caught the attention of Black women on TikTok. At the suggestion of her followers, Marie decided to test whether her time on Hinge would improve if she changed her race from Black to white and hid her ethnicity on her profile. The results were startling.
“Twenty-four hours later (from changing her race) here is what I’m seeing. I’m seeing a lot more white men, which makes sense for where I live,” Marie said. “But beyond race, I’m seeing better jobs and more education across all of the races. White men, Black men, Asian men—they all share advanced degrees or really good jobs.”
@cityvibeswithmarie Dating app experiment day 21. Changing my race on Hinge part 2. Only sharing the data and maybe a few observations
#datingadvice #onlinedating #datingapps #hinge #datingtips
Noting that she has an MBA, Marie added that she would’ve expected to see educated men with good careers before, but she didn’t until she changed her race to white. She also noted that she received more likes, going from one like per day to 10 likes in 24 hours.
“Relatively speaking, that’s a 10x change in the number of likes now that I’ve changed my race. I am only a day into this and the bigger question for me is what will happen over the next three days or five days. How does this affect who I match with?” she asked, adding that she’d give an update in a future video.
While users in the comments expressed their shock at the results of Marie’s experiments, writing that they were waiting for her update, others wrote that they had done a similar investigation and gotten the same results. In fact, on TikTok, Marie is not the only user to have made a video stating that changing her race on Hinge drastically improved her experience.
In 2024, user @bodaciousboho made two Hinge accounts using the exact same pictures of herself and the exact same prompts. On one, she left her race as Black, and on the other, she changed her race to white. Her white profile massively outperformed her Black one.
“This app, Hinge, is not for Black women,” she said. “It’s not just the fact that people prefer white women, right, it’s the fact that this algorithm is pushing White women more than it is Black women… This is systemic. This app was not built for us. I need to know when that class action lawsuit is happening, cause bitch sign me up and give me my motherfucking check.”
Black women aren’t the only ones facing this issue with the dating app. According to the British newspaper the i, South Asian journalist Radhika Sanghani, who is based in London, found she had the same issue and only received matches with men of the same race even though she had her ethnicity preferences open to men of all races.
Orly Lobel, a professor and author of the book “The Equality Machine,” told the publication that most dating apps consider ethnicity when creating their algorithms and could be promoting racial bias even if that is not their intention.
While Hinge has not made any statements on this algorithmic phenomenon on its app, the experiences of Black women online show that the algorithm may be the problem rather than users’ preferences. Giving an update on her experiment, Marie gave her followers sad news.
“Before I changed my race, Hinge was showing me profiles I would not have considered compatible in terms of lifestyle, education or career. This is why I had zero matches in the two and a half weeks I was on Hinge. That all changed when I changed my race. I started seeing profiles from all races that I would consider to be compatible with what I was looking for,” she said. “If you ask me for my hypothesis, I would say there is bias built into the algorithm that is systematically deprioritizing Black women.”
“Yep, Hinge was the ONLY app to give me such outcomes. Given my experiences, I’d say it’s their algorithm specifically and not just the preferences people put,” wrote one user.
“Exactly! They’re suppressing certain profiles. You’re validating the hypothesis. Machine learning in apps for ya,” added another.
One lawyer even hoped Marie would consider suing the dating platform: “Girl. As a lawyer, I pray you get THAT CHECK from Hinge as a consultant to fix their algorithm after this!!! If not, I truly hope you sue the pants off them and use this exact data right here.”
And other users commented that experiment or not, they felt the app simply wasn’t Black woman-friendly.
