Justice

What Happened When This Woman Wore A Hijab In Her Tinder Profile

January 19th 2016

Canadian YouTube user LOLpervs, who goes by the name Davison, did a social "sexperiment" in which she made identical Tinder profiles but in one account she wore a hijab. Using the name Sara and age 27 for both of these accounts, in Canada, Davison set out to find which Tinder profile would get more matches.

Tinder hijabDavison YouTube - youtube.com

Tinder notified Davison that she would have to upgrade to Tinder Plus to swipe right on more than 120 profiles in 12 hours, and she hit the maximum capacity through her free accounts. So she decided to swipe right on 120 matches every 12 hours (a total of 240 potential matches).

Davison wrote that a few guys figured out that she had two profiles but that the majority didn't appear to pick up on it. Davison said in her YouTube video that on Saturday night, the "Muslim Sara" got only 100 out of 240 matches compared to 143 out of 240 matches for the "Christian Sara."

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Tinder hijabDavison YouTube - youtube.com

Tinder hijabDavison YouTube - youtube.com

By Sunday, Christian Sara saw a match success rate of 63.8 percent while Muslim Sara's success rate was only 44.6 percent.

"Then everything fell apart because suddenly I got blocked on Tinder," Davison said. "Not for Christian Sara, for Muslim Sara because too many users had reported my profile."

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"I have no way of knowing if it's that users were angry because they saw I had two identical profiles, or if it had something to do with the fact that I was Muslim that I was banned," Davison said. "But I find it very interesting that until today, Tuesday, I have a fully functional Christian Sara profile and a completely blocked Muslim profile."

Davison added that she has written to Tinder more than once asking to reactive Muslim Sara's profile but that her attempts to return to the platform have been unsuccessful.

Some found Davison's experiment offensive and trivializing of Muslim women. Comedian Maysoon Zayid told The Daily Dot that Davison's experiment was "highly offensive" and "cartoonish."

In her YouTube video, Davidson explained that that her intention was to call out potential Islamophobia in Tinder's users. She told The Daily Dot that she has not received any direct feedback from Muslim women regarding the experiment.

Davison told ATTN: via email that her followers responded "well" to the experiment and that she was not surprised that Muslim Sara received fewer matches.

"I was not surprised that Muslim Sara received fewer matches because I suspected that, given the demographics of both Tinder and the city I live in and that people have a tendency to want to date people like themselves (similar backgrounds/faiths/looks), that Sara's implied Muslim profile would be less in demand," Davison wrote. "The social experiment was all about testing out that assumption!"

She added that she doesn't think her experiment was offensive "because it is a necessary social exploration of what it may be like to be a Muslim woman on a dating site, which is especially important given the current state of Islamophobia in the Western world."

Here is the rest of Davison's statement to ATTN:

"In web social experimentation, posing as another identity is sometimes necessary to spark important cultural discussions. Any offense my experiment generates is negated by the larger social good of debate and discussion. Also, the other part of the social experiment itself is to see what reactions are generated in the public and what that reveals about the issues put forth in the experiments themselves."

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Other social experiments on Tinder.

Davison isn't the only person to conduct a social experiment on Tinder. Last year, ATTN: wrote about Laura Nowak, the creator of popular Instagram page feminist_tinder, which has nearly 100,000 followers. After placing the word "feminist" in her Tinder profile, Nowak found that many male Tinder users lash out when they see a self-proclaimed feminist on the app. Nowak uses her Instagram page to share screenshots of things men have said self-described feminist users:

This article has been updated to include Davison's email statement to ATTN:.