French women are Europe’s most hard-to-get, finds online study – unlike 007’s new French Bond girl

The French aside, Europe’s women are the world’s most approachable; more than North or South Americans, Asians, Africans, Australians

The women of Peru are the world’s most selective towards men online  

LONDON: French women are not just the world’s most chic and sophisticated but they are also, finds a new large-scale scale study, the European women that it’s hardest for men to engage in online conversation.

They are, in short, unlike the seductive new Bond girl played by French actress Berenice Marlohe in the latest 007 movie as a troubled femme fatale who lures Bond into her arms. These are the findings of a global study by Badoo.com, the world’s largest social networking site for meeting new people, with 164 million users.   

Badoo’s statisticians measured female response rates to male advances across the world, crunching data from 147 million online interactions on the site across 180 countries.

They found that French women were Europe’s hardest to involve in online conversation, with British women some way behind in second and Germans third. Czech women were Europe’s most likely to respond to male attention, followed by Dutch and Swiss ones.”

“French women are clearly getting lots of male attention on Badoo”, says Louise Thompson, Director of PR for Badoo, a site for flirting, dating and chatting. “They can pick and choose when to respond.”

However much the world has changed, says Thompson, men are still more likely than women to be the ones making the first online approach to the opposite sex. “We wanted to know whether women in some places were more likely than in others to chat with interested men.” 

France may be the nation that gave the world Paris, “City of Love” and Napoleon’s beloved Josephine (as in, “Not tonight, Josephine”).

It may have given us not just the actress portraying the sultry new Bond girl, Severine but also an earlier cinematic heroine named Severine, portrayed by Catherine Deneuve with equal allure in the 1967 film classic, “Belle de Jour”. 

France, however, is also the nation that gave us both Gallic cool and Gallic indifference. French women, it seems, are using plenty of both when approached by French men online.

So, do men in France have to try harder with women than those elsewhere?  

Yes, definitely, answers Helena Frith Powell, a British writer whose new book, “Love In A Warm Climate – A Novel About The French Art of Love”, draws on her 10 years living in France.

They also need to flirt harder: “An English male friend of mine went to work in a bank in France”, she says. “And he was instructed to flirt more with his female colleagues. They wanted to know why he didn’t flirt with them; did he think they were ugly?”

French politicians and their partners, such as Carla Bruni and Valerie Trierweiler, seem to have more interesting love lives than their counterparts elsewhere. But this, it seems, is not because French women are instantly receptive to male advances.

“La séduction” may be a key idea and a driving force in French life but that does not mean that it is something easy. On the contrary, it requires skill, effort and art. Thus, French women require more of their men than do women elsewhere in Europe.

Badoo’s statisticians measured female response rates to male advances in not just Europe but the world as a whole. The women of Peru proved the globe’s most selective of all when responding to male online attention. The women of Lima, Peru’s capital, ranked higher on this score than women in any other city worldwide.

South American countries filled three of the top five places in Badoo’s ranking its 100 biggest national markets according to the difficulty a man in each country faces in getting a response when approaching a woman online. Ecuador and Venezeula ranked fourth and fifth respectively, suggesting perhaps that South American women are the world’s most selective towards men.

Badoo’ statisticians, however, also divided the world into nine major regions, ranging from Europe to Africa to Asia. Despite the coolness of French women, the data show that European women as a whole are the readiest to chat with men online, while Middle Eastern women are the least likely to do so.

North American women are less likely to respond to male attention than not just Europeans but also most others. North America ranked seventh out of nine world regions in the female responsiveness table – one behind Australia & Oceania in sixth place and one ahead of South American women in eighth.

Table 1:

Europe’s Hardest Women To Impress Online

– Badoo’s Top 10 European Markets Ranked By Likelihood of A Woman There Responding To A Male Approach Online: Starting With The LEAST Likely To Respond At The Top

RANK	COUNTRY
1	France
2	UK
3	Germany
4	Spain
5=	Italy
5=	Portugal
5=	Poland
8	Switzerland
9	Netherlands
10	Czech Republic

Explanation: The table shows that French women are Europe’s least likely to respond to male advances online, while Czech women are most likely to do so.