Gendered age preferences for potential partners: a mixed-methods study among online daters in Shanghai

Abstract

Single people increasingly look for romantic partners online. We use online dating as a lens to understand age preferences for potential partners and their implications for relationship formation and family change in China. Situated in Shanghai, this mixed-methods study employs a complementary design to analyze data from 5,888 dating profiles and 29 interviews with online daters. Using a two-sided analytical approach, we find that age preferences are highly gendered: With increases in age, men increasingly prefer partners who are much younger than themselves whereas women do not show much variation in preferred age gaps between them and their partners. In-depth interviews reveal the deep roots of these preferences. Gender differences in age preferences are shaped by the stigmatization of single women and men past a certain age, the centrality of reproduction in carrying the family line, and the highly differentiated gender roles in Chinese families. Taken together, online dating likely reinforces existing gender- and age-based hierarchies in China’s marriage market. Gender asymmetry in mate preferences may contribute to further increases in marriage delay and non-marriage in urban China.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Ming He for his help with collecting the quantitative data used in this paper.

Notes

1 Older cohorts may hold more traditional gender attitudes and thus express stronger preferences for age hypergamy. Unfortunately, the dating profile data we use do not contain measures of gender attitudes. As robustness checks, we use the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey data to predict individuals’ gender attitudes based on their gender, age group, education, and marital status (see Zhang and Liu 2021 for operationalizing gender attitudes). We then replicate our analysis of the dating profile data while controlling for average gender attitudes of each gender and age group. Our results remain substantively the same. This supplementary analysis (available upon request) suggests that the change in mate preferences across age groups is unlikely driven by cohort differences in gender attitudes.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the University of British Columbia through the Hampton Fund Research Grant—New Faculty Award (Principal Investigator: Yue Qian).

Notes on contributors

Yue Qian

Yue Qian is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on social demography, family, and gender in East Asian and North American contexts. Specifically, she has been studying how gender intersects with family and population processes, such as assortative mating, divisions of labor, and migration, to shape individual well-being and societal inequality. Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Gender & Society, and Journal of Marriage and Family.

Yang Shen

Yang Shen is an Associate Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research interests lie in gender and family theories, migration studies and social policies. Her current research projects include women’s reproductive practices and online dating in China. Her academic articles appeared in Studies in Higher Education, Journal of Family Issues, China Quarterly, Journal of Social Issues, among others. Her book monograph ‘Beyond tears and laughter: gender, migration and the service sector in China’ has been published by Palgrave in 2019.

Manlin Cai

Manlin Cai is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests center around family, gender, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in changing gender relationships and attitudes in China, and how they shape and are shaped by family dynamics under the broader social, cultural, and institutional contexts.