Sex and race

I read somewhere that one of the few places where minorities were over-represented in the American workforce were Asian women in television news.  The explanation was that women assumed Asian women were smart, while men thought they looked exotic.  This perception is supported by another piece of trivia floating around in my head, that there used to be an annual survey where people were asked to name the male and female newscaster they thought was the most intelligent; Connie Chung won several years in a row despite the consensus among some of her colleagues that she was not a rocket science (an evaluation supported by her marriage to Maury Povitch).

Perceptions about sex and race have always been a volatile combination.  For centuries racist perpetuated the myth that African-American men were fascinated with white women.  In the musical South Pacific, the handsome white naval officer is seen as the perfect match for an attractive native girl by her mother; she sings the song “Happy talk” about their union, overlooking the fact that they don’t speak the same language so the two of them are doing something other than “talking” when they were together.

I recently took another look at some data on the matter from Christian Rudder’s 2014 book Dataclysm.  Rudder was a c-founder of the dating site OKCupid and therefore had access to its database.  Anyone who wants to go to the horse’s mouth can check out pages 101-102 of the book.

Below is an amended version of a chart he presents that shows how men of different races perceived the attractiveness of the women the met.  For simplicity, race is restricted to White, Asian, Latino, and Black (I will eschew the PC African-American as nationality is not reflected in the data).  The data comes from 10 million users of OKCupid, where men described the attractiveness of the women they met on a 1-5-point scale.  Here is the breakdown by race:

	Woman’s race
Man’s race	Asian	Black	Latina	White	average	range
Asian	3.16	1.97	2.74	2.85	2.68	1.19
Black	3.4	3.31	3.43	3.23	3.34	0.20
Latino	3.13	2.24	3.37	3.19	2.98	1.13
White	2.91	2.04	2.82	2.98	2.69	0.94

I see three things of note in this data.  1) Black men find women in general more attractive than men of other races.  The average attractiveness for Black men is 3.34, a full 1/3 of a rate point above the next highest race.  Asians, Latinos and Whites all have average ratings below the expected median of 3 on a 5-point scale, but Blacks are above the expected median.

2) Black men are the most egalitarian.  The range between the high and low of the other three races is close to or over a full rate point, but for Black men the difference between their least attractive race (White women; there goes that myth) and the most attractive (Latina women) was only 0.20.  Black men not only find women more attractive in general, they find ALL women more attractive.

3) Black men are the only race who do NOT find women of their own race the most attractive.  Asians, Whites and Latinos all prefer women of their own race, but Black men find Latina women the most attractive, followed by Asian women, and then Black women.  Black women are rated last by Asians, Whites and Latinos and third by Black men, meaning for some reason no one finds Black women that attractive (who volunteers to break the news to Halle Berry?).

Here is another chart from Dataclysm, where the author “normalized” the above data using the unweighted averages:

	Woman’s race
Man’s race	Asian	Black	Latina	White
Asian	18%	-26%	2%	6%
Black	2%	-1%	3%	-3%
Latino	5%	-25%	13%	7%
White	8%	-24%	5%	11%

What these numbers mean is, for example, that Asian men find the typical Asian woman to be 18% more attractive than the average woman of any race; on the other hand, Asian men find the typical Black woman to be 26% less attractive than the overall average woman.

What jumps out with these numbers is that men of all races find Black women to be less attractive than the average woman. The only interaction where a man of one race finds a typical woman of another race less attractive than average, other than Black women, is Black men and White women.  It’s sort of like Lake Woebegone, where all children are above average, except here almost all women that are below average (using averages) are Black.

What does this mean?  I have no idea.  Extrapolating from aggregated data is always tricky.  I suppose you could say that the fact that there is enough inter-racial mixing to have data like this is encouraging (unless you are an unrepentant anti-miscegenist).  But the numbers indicate that the way men of different races perceive women of different races is not cut and dried.

I seem to recall that when Will Smith made the movie Hitch, he said that his romantic lead had to be Hispanic, like Eva Mendes, because a White actress would have lost the American audience and a Black actress would have lost the international audience.  Then just ten years later he made Focus, where his romantic lead was Margot Robbie and no one commented on the fact that she was White (people did notice that she was 22 years younger than him, but that’s another issue about Hollywood and ageism).

As Bob Dylan said, the times they are a ‘changing.