Three months ago, the dating app Tinder announced that it would add a feature many of their users had been requesting: the option to include job and education information on their profiles. At the time, I wrote that this was perhaps a sign that the dating app was going the way of traditional dating—when it isn’t just a snap judgement based on a photo, people might start matching more often with those of similar education and economic backgrounds (a phenomenon that researchers call “assortative mating”).
Tinder said that adding these two pieces of information would mean its users could make “more informed choices” when deciding whether to swipe right and “like” another user’s profile. Since then, millions of users have added their jobs to their profiles and recently, Tinder released a list of the most right-swiped jobs in the U.S., broken down by gender, between November 2015 and January 2016.
Pilots were the most popular job among people viewing men’s profiles; physical therapists were the most popular among those viewing women’s. But the list gets more interesting when paired with data about the earnings of each of the most popular professions. Matching Bureau of Labor Statistics data with the most right-swiped professions provides a look into whether high-earning professions on Tinder are more popular than low-earning ones, and whether there’s a gender difference in these preferences. In other words: Are men whose jobs suggest they make more money more sought-after? What about women with lucrative-sounding jobs?