Scientists Found a Surprisingly Simple Way To Improve Online Matchmaking

A new study suggests that a simple change to how online matchmaking platforms display profiles can significantly improve user experience and lead to higher-quality matches.

Finding the right match online is not just a matter of algorithms. On many digital platforms, including dating and matrimonial services, a severe imbalance between the number of users on each side can overwhelm some people while leaving others frustrated, ultimately reducing the platform’s effectiveness.

Researchers at George Mason University investigated this problem using one of India’s largest matrimonial platforms, where men typically outnumber women by a wide margin. According to Sabari Rajan Karmegam, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business, the typical men-to-women ratio ranges from 60:40 to as high as 90:10.

In a forthcoming paper published in Information Systems Research, Karmegam and coauthors Jui Ramaprasad of the University of Maryland and Anand Gopal of Nanyang Technological University examined how this gender imbalance shapes user behavior and tested whether a simple change to the platform’s design could improve the quality of matches for everyone.

Because the platform had far more men than women, men often sent large numbers of invitations with little selectivity in an effort to improve their odds of matching. That created a major imbalance in incoming messages. In Karmegam’s study, women received about 40 times as many expressions of interest (EIs) as men on average.

That flood of EIs left women feeling “extremely overwhelmed in the initial couple of days after joining the platform,” Karmegam says. “Once they were flooded with all these requests, it was hard for them to figure out what the platform was all about. Congestion led to reduced engagement by women and potential exit from the platform. Under prevailing social norms in India, families often share in that sorting burden.” The uneven design also made men less satisfied because of intense competition.

Filtering changed who appeared

To improve the experience for both sides, Karmegam and his coauthors tested “gender gating,” a process that showed women’s profiles only to men who met culturally acceptable criteria related to education, income, and age. For example, the “gender gate” blocked a man in his forties from seeing profiles of women more than 10 years younger or a couple of years older than him. Women could change the default “gender-gated” settings based on their own preferences, but men could not opt out of the limits.

The experiment used two groups, one control and one treatment, each representing a state in India. The two states were similar in size and socioeconomic indicators and were geographically close, but they differed in language and cultural characteristics. This design reduced interference and helped isolate the effect of the intervention.

Fewer requests improved matches

Karmegam and his coauthors found that “gender gating” greatly improved women’s platform interaction, increased matches, and improved match quality without hurting male users. It also led women to initiate more matches because they spent less time screening for possible partners.

Compared with the control group, women in the treatment group received 6 percent fewer post-intervention EIs, while match efficacy improved by 72 percent. The paper links this improvement to both the lower number of EIs and stronger alignment with social norms.

Women over 25, who are at prime marriageable age and therefore align in age with more men on the platform who are seeking marriage, saw a 103 percent improvement in matching efficacy. They also sent 113 percent more EIs after the intervention, showing greater agency.

In this context, a match does not mean a marriage. It means an open line of communication with a serious prospect. “Most of the conversation happens offline,” Karmegam says. “A lot of things need to happen outside the platform for things to work out, and our study does not capture that.”

Sorting could reshape platforms

The “gender gating” experiment worked so well that the platform expanded the intervention to its full user pool, Karmegam reports. With that move, the platform joined matchmaking services such as JDate and SKY People, which use culturally appropriate criteria to improve matchmaking accuracy.

Karmegam says similar interventions could apply beyond romance. “This is something that can be applied to any people-to-people matching. For example, the majority of Uber drivers are men. Parents could ask for their daughter’s Uber teen account to be ‘gender gated’, as an extra layer of protection,” he says.

Criteria-based sorting may also improve hiring in highly competitive fields such as academia. “Narrowing the search to candidates who meet specific criteria, such as schools from which the applicants might have received their PhD degrees, would help raise the effectiveness of the process,” Karmegam says.

Reference: “Gender Gating? Addressing the Impact of Congestion on the User Experience for Women in Online Matrimonial Matching Platforms” by Sabari Rajan Karmegam, Anandasivam Gopal and Jui Ramaprasad, 14 May 2026, SSRN Electronic Journal.
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5254083

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