A new insight on interracial dating

In Slate, a researcher who ran a speed-dating service and kept stats on it. He found men tend to go more by looks, women by smarts. Also:

[A] clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference.

My only problem with this is that I personally know white men with Asian preferences, and that stereotype certainly didn't come from nowhere. They may not be enough to show up statistically as a "white male preference for East Asian women," but the notion is not a "myth."

Also, it's pretty interesting that, regarding interracial dating, women are more racist than men. Which is kind of odd, because often times it's a male figure (the cranky father, say) who's portrayed as wanting racial purity.