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

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, because 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 screening costs for women participants, eventually leading to reduced activity or their exit from the platform. We study the efficacy of a specific platform-level intervention that we call “gender gating,” which serves as a strategic screening mechanism applied by the platform to reduce the congestion faced by women, thereby improving their overall user experience on the platform. Gender gating restricts the profile visibility of women in a leading matrimonial platform to counterparties who satisfy conditions based on age, education, and income. These restrictions are based on institutional and social norms prevalent within the matrimonial matching context in India, where our experiment is set. Using a quasi-experimental setup, where the treatment is implemented in one subdomain of the platform, we leverage cross-sectional variation between subdomains and temporal variation around the intervention to test the effectiveness of gender gating on congestion, matching efficacy, and the level of agency experienced by women. Our analysis shows that women in the treatment group received fewer (unwanted) contact requests relative to a control group, thereby reducing congestion. Importantly, gender gating resulted in higher matching efficacy and more agency, because treated 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.

History: Karthik Kannan, Senior Editor; Hillol Bala, Associate Editor.

Funding: Partial support for S. R. Karmegam was provided through the PhD Program of the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2024.1008.