What Women and Men Want: Gender Differences in Mate Preference of Online Dating Services

This paper studies the effect of gender differences in mate preference in one of the major Iranian online dating services. To best of our knowledge, there are only few similar studies conducted with this objective focusing on Iran. A quantitate approach is utilized in this paper which is inferred from a database of approximately 84 thousands of users from various geographical location inside Iran. Statistical analysis of this paper concentrates on two important criteria; (1) Personal/Parental qualities (which includes: honesty, kindness, faith and trustworthiness, fidelity, being funny and loving travel) and (2) Attractiveness/Social Status (which includes: looks, education, income, family status and being born in Tehran). The study concludes that men tends to prefer qualities such as looks, honesty and fidelity while women mostly prefer qualities such as being born in Tehran, education, faith and trustworthiness, family status and income over other qualities