Is Your Job on Tinder’s Most Swiped Professions List?

In November 2015, Tinder began including job titles in its swipe cards. As Tinder’s blog explained:

Adding your job to your profile is a great way to provide additional insight for potential matches — it also increases your chances of receiving a right swipe!

Well… let’s say that it increases your chances of receiving a right swipe depending on the job. They did get that “additional insight for potential matches” part right, though; I find myself reading the job title even before I look at the person’s face. (Remember that chart Mike shared, illustrating which types of professions were most likely to marry each other? I am well aware of which careers and professional interests might match the best with mine.)

Adding “first name + job title” also makes it very easy for me to look someone up before right swiping, to check out their Twitter and Facebook and get a general sense of their public-facing interests and sense of humor. It’s the perfect tool for collecting data on someone, before you make the initial commitment that might lead to a match and a message and a conversation and a first date. (Or, more likely, a match and no message. We all know how Tinder works.)

Of course, Tinder has also been collecting data on all of us, and here it is:

Yes, Tinder has been keeping track of our swipes, and now they have data on which jobs we find most attractive.

Tinder does not provide an analysis of its data, so we could ask ourselves whether it’s the job itself that provides the impulse to swipe, or whether people in these jobs are slightly more attractive than average, or whether these jobs are disproportionally represented among Tinder users. Take “pilot,” for example; one pilot could travel to multiple cities in a week, allowing his Tinder profile to be swiped right by multiple people in various locations and increasing the number of times “pilot” shows up on the swipe list. A teacher, on the other hand, is probably only going to be swiped in a single geographic area.

It’s worth noting that these jobs do not necessarily correlate with high income. Jezebel offers a tongue-in-cheek summary of each job, highlighting the drawbacks:

#1 Pilots

Even though they’re notoriously underpaid, they are synonymous with jetsetting, travel, aviators, and winking, confident smiles. They harken back to a bygone era of easy confidence, thousand-watt charm, and nostalgia for “men’s men” and the high glam of flying. If you’re not looking for anything serious, you could do a lot worse than hook up with someone who’s worldly and skilled at light banter.

Fantasy: Nuanced command of the controls

Reality: Old-fashioned moves; has to be somewhere very early; may narrate sex highlights in real time.

So what are we looking for, when we swipe right on these jobs? Is it glamour? Career stability? Perceived socioeconomic status? Or is it still all about the image and its myriad of tiny cues about personality and values—as Anne Helen Petersen so brilliantly demonstrated in her essay on what you can tell about a person from their Tinder photo—with the job trailing afterwards?

Also: is your job on the list?

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