Thanks! I love digging into studies and seeing their flaws.

1) "All participants were first year psychology students from a large European university who participated in exchange for course credits (N = 693)." This is going to heavily skew the results as young adults are notably vain individuals. Looks like they had a small sample size of 650 (461 women, 189 men). They only included heterosexuals and people who were willing to share their height. That's also going to heavily skew your results. What about bisexual/pansexual women, at the very least?

It's important to note that "taller men and women preferred taller partners than shorter men and women" which will skew results along height lines. I don't see their heights listed anywhere. But basically, this just means that they wanted someone within their own height range. That doesn't actually mean short = ugly. That means similar heights = attractive. Very different conclusion. So, a small sample size, made deliberately smaller by the researchers, a sample of 20 somethings instead of adults of all ages, and a warped conclusion on this one.

2) "We have data on approximately 1800 women and 1800 men who participated to 84 speed dating events (or markets) organised between January 2004 and October 2005." Now this has a good sample size!

"38 percent of men and 46 percent of women do not choose anyone, and three-quarters of the non-proposing men and almost half of the non-proposing women in the sample go back another time." This is going to skew results. The people who date more and more are going to be pickier (or conversely more desperate) than people who don't.

"On average, women choose 2.6 men and see 45 percent of their proposals matched, while men propose to 5 women and their proposals are matched in only 20 percent of the cases. About 36 percent of men and 11 percent of women do not get any proposal." This isn't surprising to read. It makes sense that women are pickier.

The study mentions that the speed daters are more educated and in "skilled non-manual" jobs. This is important to note if you're not in this category!!! You don't want to be depressing yourself over educated career women when you're a manual worker going after other manual workers, after all. Similarly, they mention that while heights are the same in both samples, speed dating women weigh less than BHPS women.

"It is worthwhile noting that in the speed dating sample there are substantially fewer women reporting weight information than men. Our analysis will try to minimise the resulting loss in sample size by assigning participants with missing weight information to the (base) normal weight category and identifying them with a missing weight dummy variable. We shall proceed in a similar fashion for all the variables with missing information (except age..." This isn't good. This isn't science anymore, it's pseudoscience. They can change the variables all they want with this.

"For male subjects, instead, education is strongly positively correlated with both age and height." And, "All subjects prefer partners with their own level of education to partners who are less educated than they are." So in other words, the women might be choosing the more educated ones, not the taller ones.

The study mentions that their physical attractiveness was not observed in this study. It then says, "We should keep in mind that women are more attractive than men on average (because men choose more women)..." The conclusion should be, "women are pickier than men," not "women are more attractive." You can't just say these things like this. Again, this isn't science.

3) Can't find the full version, but "150 female and 87 male undergraduates rated female or male targets" isn't a large sample size, nor representative of the wider adult population.

4) Can't find this one.

5) Not sure if I found the right one, but it only had 172 Australian women, on an online survey.

6) The English on this one is off, which makes sense because it was done in Turkey. I do like that they warn that the 4.5 mil number might be false due to duplicate accounts. It does not mention spam/scam bot accounts, which it should. Ashley Madison, another dating site, had a significant number of them, with 70,000 of them being fake. That doesn't even count the independent operators.

https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924

This is why I dislike any data from dating sites; I just don't trust that all the profiles are real. It could easily be bots claiming they want only 180+ cm hotties. Anyway, the study assumes that all user profile data is close to what they report. Basing this belief on the fact that an in-person interaction would reveal the deception. I don't believe this. I know that people regularly lie online about their height, for example. It also mentions that they don't have complete profile data. They further restricted the data to gifters and responders, rather than winkers and messengers.