Making women send the first message, does it actually empower women?

Recently, a lot of dating apps have tried to level out the playing field and removed the gender-based nuances that favour one gender over the other. This has been exemplified by giving certain features to a specific gender.

At first glance, giving women the power to make the first move may sounds appealing. However, we are finding that enforcing these pressures on women to take the lead, may have adverse effects, as the right swipe is already an indication that the girl is interested. Therefore, what difference does it make with regards to who sends the first message? The guy still knows the girl is interested by the initial action of the right swipe.

The invention of ‘The Swipe’ has made who sends the first message redundant.

Before ‘The Swipe’ was introduced, apps and websites were based on just one person sending out an interest and the other person accepting it. With the invention of ‘The Swipe’, who sends the first message has become meaningless. If we dig deeper, data suggests that 93% of men right swipe >90% of profiles they see (in fact machines have been invented that will auto left swipe for you continuously.

Therefore, dating apps have tried to solve this by limiting the number of swipes in a day. However, we believe they have failed because men still tend to mainly swipe right on their total daily limit (50 or 100 a day depending on which app).

Women are becoming disillusioned with their dating app experience.

Women’s online dating experience is often different to a male’s experience. More and more we are seeing that women will match with a lot of the men they choose to swipe right for, but unfortunately, these matches are left empty as they are the result of an ego boost for men. As a result, the pattern is most women get a lot of matches, and only a low % lead to a genuine conversation.

The data suggests, women are more genuine right swipers and they consider their choice of swipe, thus they might be excited when they get a match! In turn, making it hurtful when a male ghosts out or isn’t equally sincere. Indeed, a fraction of women will get a lot of replies too, but a vast majority of the women feel delusional on how men behave after they match. However, this is not a widely known fact because most women usually don't like saying that I have 50 matches and only 5 replies.

Genie designed an innovative ‘dual’ swiping feature to make swipes more genuine.

Genie tries to resolve the issue of men randomly right swiping by making the swipe as genuine as possible and designing an innovative split screen swiping module. It never shows one user at a time, it always shows two, so a user can right swipe only one of them. By being faced with options, the user must genuinely think before they swipe. Yet, to keep the element of choice still available, the user can ‘fetch’ the auto-left swiped user and then right swipe them too. At the same time, users can left swipe anyone and the other user won’t be auto right swiped. By keeping the fetches limited, to say 3 or 5, Genie can enforce that ‘The Swipe’ becomes very accurate.

So why does this work? Well, if men were genuinely not interested, they would not bother spending the time fetching another woman’s profile back and the awareness of a limitation of fetches further ensures that they are genuinely interested. This benefits women as it ensures they have a better chance at getting dates with men who are genuinely interested.

And of course, women aren’t forced to send the first message.

Download the app now and say bye to missed connections. Say yes to real life dating.