Dating apps have made it much easier to find people. Building a dating marketplace where different groups actually want to stay and participate is a different challenge.
Gender mix gives us one useful way to look at that challenge.
Across parts of the dating industry, men still significantly outnumber women. Against that backdrop, Clique83 has developed something we find worth paying attention to: our current user mix has more women than men.
We do not see that as a trophy metric. A gender ratio alone cannot tell us that a dating product works. What makes it interesting is the question behind the number: what does female participation tell us about the experience people are choosing to join?
What Does the Gender Gap on Dating Apps Look Like Today?
Recent audience data shows that gender imbalance remains visible across major dating platforms, with men substantially outnumbering women in some markets.
Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found that men represented 68% of visitors to online dating services in the UK in May 2025, up from 65% a year earlier. Female visitors, meanwhile, fell slightly to 1.7 million.
The imbalance was even clearer on Tinder. Ofcom reported that its UK female audience fell from 735,000 in May 2024 to 384,000 in May 2025, leaving men outnumbering women by roughly three to one.
A year earlier, the same Ofcom research found that men represented 65% of UK adults visiting online dating sites, compared with 35% women. Hinge was the only service among the top ten where women slightly outnumbered men at the time.
These figures describe the UK rather than the entire global dating market, so we would not use them to claim that every dating app has the same gender structure.
They do show something important: attracting and keeping women engaged remains a real marketplace challenge for parts of the dating industry.
That makes female participation worth understanding beyond the top-line registration number.
Why Can Female Participation Be Harder for Dating Platforms to Sustain?
Women can experience the same dating marketplace very differently from men, particularly around interaction volume, trust and the ability to find a genuine connection.
More activity does not automatically create a better experience.
Pew Research Center found that among Americans who had recently used dating apps or sites, 54% of women said they had felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received, compared with 25% of men.
Other parts of the experience can carry more friction as well. Among women under 50 in Pew's U.S. research who had used online dating, 56% said they had received an unwanted sexually explicit message or image, while 43% had experienced continued contact after saying they were not interested.
The issue also goes beyond safety.
Ipsos research published in 2025 found that 51% of female dating-app users surveyed identified difficulty making a genuine connection as a frustration, compared with 40% of men.
These findings point to a broader product question.
Actually, high interaction volume does not make women more likely to stay on a dating platform. If women receive many messages but still feel overwhelmed or struggle to form genuine connections, adding more profiles or interactions is unlikely to address the friction they experience.
Female participation therefore depends on how those interactions feel and where they lead, rather than simply how many opportunities the platform can generate.
What Does Gender Mix Tell Clique83 About a Dating Marketplace?
Gender mix helps us understand how a dating marketplace is functioning, not simply how large it has become.
Dating products depend on people finding enough relevant opportunities to connect. If participation becomes heavily concentrated on one side, having a large number of registered users may still create a very different experience for the people using the platform.
Research on online dating marketplaces supports this idea. A study of a European dating platform found that participation from one side of the marketplace influenced the experience and behaviour of the other. The researchers also showed that a healthy marketplace cannot be reduced to achieving a perfect 50:50 gender split.
More recent research published in Marketing Science reached a related conclusion: the number of potential partners available can change how people search and make decisions. When users face more options or more competition, their behaviour changes too.
So the more useful question is not simply: How many people have joined?
It is: Do the people who join still have meaningful opportunities to connect?
That means looking beyond total registrations to signals such as continued participation, mutual interest and movement toward real meetings.
Gender mix gives us one way to understand those marketplace dynamics.
What Does Clique83’s Female-Majority User Mix Suggest About the App?
Against a dating category where female participation can be difficult to sustain, Clique83’s female-majority user mix is a signal worth examining in the context of how our Coffee Date app is designed.
We are careful with the word signal.
Having more women than men does not prove that Coffee Date has solved gender imbalance across dating apps. It also does not mean that one feature alone explains why women choose to participate.
What it gives us is a more useful question: What feels different about a dating app experience where women are choosing to participate in significant numbers?
Coffee Date is designed as an offline dating app with a more structured path from introduction to a real-life meeting.
Members receive one AI-suggested introduction at a time rather than continuously browsing a large profile feed. The introduction is private, and the Match Letter gives both people more context before they decide if they want to meet.
Trust and safety are also built into different stages of the Coffee Date experience.
Profiles go through human review before entering the app experience. Each person then decides independently if they want to meet, and the next step opens only when interest is mutual. Once both people say yes, we help coordinate the date through our partner venue network.
That structure can reduce some of the uncertainty that comes with meeting someone from a traditional dating app. Members have more context before deciding, both sides have explicitly chosen to meet, and the first date takes place through a venue and schedule supported within the Coffee Date system.
Our role also continues around the confirmed date. Members can access their date information through the app, with support available when plans change or someone cannot attend.
Together, these choices create a different dating app experience: less public browsing, more context before meeting, and clearer support around the move from online introduction to real-life dating.
We cannot say from gender data alone that these design choices caused our female-majority user mix.
What we can say is that the pattern is consistent with some of the friction our Coffee Date app was designed to reduce, including trust, unwanted interaction volume and uncertainty around meeting someone new.
That makes the gender mix more useful than a headline statistic. It gives us a signal we can continue testing against participation, real dates and what happens after people meet.
What Does the Gender Ratio Tell Us After People Join?
Having more women than men tells us who is choosing to join Coffee Date. What people do after joining tells us much more about the app experience.
Registration is only the beginning.
A stronger signal comes from seeing people move through the Coffee Date journey: accepting an introduction, mutually choosing to meet, showing up for the date and deciding if they want to continue the connection afterwards.
Our current Coffee Date data gives us visibility into some of those later stages. We have organised 583 Coffee Dates, with a 0.1% no-show rate and 73.9% of participants exchanging phone numbers after meeting.
These behaviours tell us something that the gender ratio alone cannot.
A female-majority user mix shows that women are choosing to enter the Coffee Date experience. Real dates and post-date behaviour help us understand if people are finding enough value to keep moving through it.
That is why we see gender mix as one signal rather than proof of product-market fit. The stronger picture comes from looking at who joins, who chooses to meet and what happens after the date.
Read more: From the Attention Economy to the Connection Economy: What Comes Next for Dating Apps?
Why Has Coffee Date by Clique83 Attracted More Women?
Coffee Date by Clique83 currently has more women participating, and we believe the way the app has been built plays an important role in that user mix.
We would not attribute the pattern to one feature alone. The experience combines several things women have told the wider dating industry they care about: more context before meeting, control over the decision to meet, less unwanted interaction and clearer support around the first date.
There is also a more human part of the story.
Clique83 was founded by Han Lam and Thuy Doanova, two women building a dating company from their own understanding of the questions, concerns and expectations women can bring into dating. That perspective has shaped how we think about trust, privacy, meeting someone new and the amount of control a person should keep throughout the experience.
You could call part of that a girls-help-girls spirit.
It does not mean Coffee Date is designed only for women. A dating app works when people on both sides want to participate. Our goal is to create an experience where women feel comfortable joining and meeting, while men also have a clearer path toward genuine introductions and real-life dates.
That is why our female-majority user mix means something to us. It suggests that a different dating app experience can attract women without asking them to spend more time browsing, messaging or staying visible inside the app.
Meet Through Coffee Date by Clique83
Coffee Date is our offline dating app built around one introduction at a time, mutual choice and a supported path to a real-life date.
We use technology to help with the introduction. We design the experience around trust and clarity. Then we give the connection room to happen between two people in real life.
Explore Coffee Date by Clique83
FAQs
Can the gender mix of a dating app change as it grows?
Yes. A dating app’s gender mix can shift as the user base expands into new cities, age groups or acquisition channels.
That is why gender balance is more useful when tracked over time rather than treated as a fixed characteristic of the app. Changes in who joins, who stays active and where growth comes from can all reshape the user mix.
Does a female-majority user base create an imbalance for male members?
Not necessarily. The experience depends on how users are distributed across preferences, age groups, locations and current availability, rather than the headline gender ratio alone.
A dating app can have more women overall while certain groups within the app still have very different levels of matching availability.
That is why the composition of the active dating pool is more useful than treating one overall percentage as the whole marketplace.
Does having more women than men mean Coffee Date is designed mainly for women?
No. Coffee Date is designed to help both people reach an informed, mutual decision about meeting in real life.
Some parts of the experience can address concerns that are especially relevant to women, such as privacy, control over the meeting decision and support around the first date.
A healthy Coffee Date experience still depends on both sides feeling comfortable participating and seeing value in the introduction.
References
Fong, J. (2024). Effects of market size and competition in two-sided markets: Evidence from online dating. Marketing Science, 43(5), 971–985.
Ipsos. (2025, May). Modern masculinity – Dating [Research charts].
McClain, C., & Gelles-Watnick, R. (2023, February 2). From looking for love to swiping the field: Online dating in the U.S. Pew Research Center.
Ofcom. (2024, November 28). Digital differences between men and women revealed.
Ofcom. (2025, December 10). Online Nation: Report 2025.
Vogels, E. A., & McClain, C. (2023, February 2). Key findings about online dating in the U.S. Pew Research Center.
Voigt, S., & Hinz, O. (2015). Network effects in two-sided markets: Why a 50/50 user split is not necessarily revenue optimal. Business Research, 8, 139–170.