Women Are Racist....In Dating, Or Are They?

That is, women prefer to date men of their own race. This is especially true for black women. Are women racist or is something else at play?

These results from the speed dating experiment roughly jibe with the study I cited in the earlier post about height-income tradeoffs. In that analysis of more than 20,000 online daters, split roughly evenly between Boston and San Diego, men didn’t show much preference for same-race partners. Women did, and African-American women showed the most pronounced preference.

A theory: Women think about children, family, society at the same time they make a date-worthy analysis. They have to know a guy more than four minutes to decide he's worth dealing with the aforementioned factors. When women date and marry outside of their race, are they more likely to have known him as a friend first? If so, that would lead credence to my theory. Maybe women aren't racist. Maybe they're pragmatic and less romantic than men. (And that's a theory I've always believed long before reading the Times article.)

By the way, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked to this--his brother married a woman of a different race. Small experiment: Were they friends first?