Or, rather, Tinder wants to stay competitive with its upstart rival Bumble, which is based completely on a women-make-the-first-move premise.
(Bumble, if you aren’t familiar, was also launched by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in December of 2014. She sued for, and reportedly got, $1 million for sexual harassment and discrimination after leaving the company.)
Tinder recently tried to buy Bumble for as much as $1 billion, and, when Bumble swiped left, saying, “No, thank you,” they decided to introduce the ladies-first option on their own.
The biggest (well, the only) real difference between this update and Bumble’s basis is that it will only be an option, as opposed to a mandatory piece of the platform. Women users will simply now have the option to respond to men of their choosing by changing their user settings.
It won’t be available at all, however, until a forthcoming Tinder update is released. The timeline for the update has not yet been announced.
In a statement made to MarketWatch (which, oh-so-romantically, was published yesterday, on St. Valentine’s Day), Match Group CEO (the parent company of Tinder) Mandy Ginsburg said, “Often, women don’t really want the pressure of kicking off the conversation, but if they want it, that’s great. Giving people the choice versus telling people how to engage is the big difference.”
As Tinder has become as famous for unsolicited pictures of male genitalia as it has for actually leading to true love and romance, the update is probably a wise decision on their part. The market certainly thinks so: Tinder closed on Wall Street at record highs 2/13 in anticipation of this new feature and update.
For more Tinder news, read this next: Tinder: Good or bad for Twin Cities’ singles?
