I have often heard my single male friends talk about how, when it comes to dating apps, women have it better than men. They kept insisting that women are at an advatangeous position because they get a lot more likes and matches, which increases their chance of meeting a good match.

So, I decided to test this theory by analyzing the Hinge data of some of my friends. Here's what that looked like.

Hinge lets users export their personal data and I crowdsourced these files from 4 female and male friends. All my analysis below is based on data from these 8 people who have been using Hinge since at least the past 6 months. Most of them are based in either Mumbai or New York City.

First, I tried to test whether women get more matches than men do. Turns out, yes, and by quite a lot. The men in my dataset, on average, sent a lot more likes than the women did, but in return, they received fewer matches and even fewer converted to chats with more than 2 messages exchanged. Hinge also asks users whether they went on a date with the person they matched and if they thought the person was their type.

Based on this analysis, I also found that both genders went out with very few people. However, this data is limited. For example, a user might have gone out with a match but not necessarily made a record of that on the app.

An App Meant to be Uninstalled?

For the longest time, Hinge has relied heavily on marketing itself as the app that is designed to be uninstalled. The company's goal is for a user to meet a good match and no longer feel the need for the app anymore. That is exactly what happened with one of my friends, Tithi Choudhary, who significantly reduced her usage of the app after meeting a good match. A guy she really, really, liked.

However, a few months in, she was back at her regular usage levels. Brownie points for guessing what happened there.

Somebody Felt the Valentine's Day Pressure

Another friend, Manav Somaiya, seems to have found a way to work around the scarce options that men claim they get on the app: subscribing to Hinge premium. In a single day, Hinge does not let users send more than 8 likes. However, Hinge Premium users do not have this limit. By subscribing to the premium service for Rs XX per month/year, Manav not only swiped a lot, but actually got more matches. In February alone, he sent 1200+ likes (for a user without Hinge Premium, the monthly limit would be around 240 likes).

Unsurprisingly, relative to the other men in my sample, Manav had a lot more matches in a month, specifically 82 matches, while the rest had an average of 8.

So while women might have a clear edge on dating apps, men could possibly work around it and have some amazing results. As for Manav, I don't know for sure whether a Hinge subscription is going to help.