Gender Gating? Addressing the Impact of Congestion on the User Experience for Women in Online Matching Platforms

Abstract

Online matching platforms suffer from a common problem-an extremely high proportion of men relative to women. This gender skew in favor of men negatively affects the welfare and user experience of women participants, since it incentivizes men to adopt an odds-based approach to starting interactions on the platform. Men tend to cast a wide net in terms of the women they contact without fully considering whether they represent a good fit. This results in significant congestion and high search and cognitive costs for women participants, eventually leading to reduced activity or exit from the platform. In this paper, we study the efficacy of a specific platform-level intervention intended to reduce the congestion faced by women, thereby improving their overall user experience on the platform. We consider "gender gating", an intervention that restricts the profile visibility of women in a leading matrimonial platform to counterparties who satisfy conditions based on age, education, income, and marital status. These restrictions are based on institutional and social norms prevalent within the matrimonial matching context in India, where our experiment is set. Using a quasiexperimental setup, where the treatment is implemented in one subdomain of the platform, we use a differencein-difference style analysis to test the effectiveness of the gender gating treatment on congestion, matching efficacy, and the level of agency experienced by women. Our analysis shows that the gender-gating intervention had the desired effect-women in the treatment group received fewer (unwanted) contact requests relative to a control group, thereby reducing congestion. Importantly, the intervention resulted in higher matching efficacy and more agency in that women initiated more contacts themselves. Our work highlights the challenges women face on online matching platforms due to gender skew-related congestion and shows how platform design can help mitigate these challenges. We also show how social norms can be suitably incorporated into platform design to enhance the platform experience for minority participants, allowing for a better overall platform experience for all participants.

Keywords: Platform Design, Matching Platforms, Online Matrimonial Matching, Gender Norms, Social Norms, Platform Congestion, Market thickness, Gender Gating, Quasi-experiment