Gender preference is certainly non-equivalent to race preference. On the other hand, it does show that certain forms of discrimination which would be wrong (and just plain illegal) in other settings are perfectly okay in a dating setting.
As a better example, I'm not interested in dating women who are old, ugly, fat, or have children, and that's perfectly okay. If I were not interested in hiring women who were old, ugly, fat or have children then I'd have a serious lawsuit on my hands.
Now personally, I think that refusing to date someone based on their race is both regrettable and closed-minded, but it's not detestable the way that actual racism is.
>"As a better example, I'm not interested in dating women who are old, ugly, fat, or have children, and that's perfectly okay. If I were not interested in hiring women who were old, ugly, fat or have children then I'd have a serious lawsuit on my hands."
If you looked at the other OkCupid chart, it shows that race has little impact on interracial match %. It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.
Your bit about hiring is also suspect. Think about 50+ years ago when minorities such as blacks really weren't up to standard due to years of slavery and persecution. Back then it was also seen as "legitimate" (using your argument) to not hire black people in the same way that people aren't dating minorities today.
>"Now personally, I think that refusing to date someone based on their race is both regrettable and closed-minded, but it's not detestable the way that actual racism is."
What is this "actual" racism? Since when is there "actual" racism and "fake" racism? I'm amazed at how many upvotes you have received with what is basically a No true Scotsman fallacy comment.
It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.
I think you need to look up how their "match %" is computed. It was described in an earlier post on that blog.
"All OkCupid users create their own matching algorithms, so when we determine who matches who, we’re just crunching the numbers people give us."
Aspects like age/location can be included as part of the user matching algorithms if it is important to them. Overweight/has kids/ugly should be equally spread out between races and should not be dependent on race, especially only after the first message.
Therefore match % is basically everything except race that is important to the user.
