A new study has found that French women are the hardest to engage with online, closely followed by Brits.

Relationships on Female First

Relationships on Female First

French women are not only chic and sophisticated but they are also the hardest women in Europe for men to engage with online.

Badoo.com conducted the study and their 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 an online conversation, with British women in second, and the Germans third. Czech women were Europe’s most likely to respond to male attention, followed by Dutch and then Swiss ones.

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

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 both Madame Bovary, the unfaithful heroine of Flaubert’s novel, and Napoleon’s beloved Josephine (as in, “Not tonight, Josephine”).

It may have given us not just the actress playing 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 both in large quantities when approached by French men online.

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

Yes, undoubtedly, 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, art and effort. 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, were the most selective in any other city worldwide.

South American countries filled three of the top five places in Badoo’s ranking its 100 biggest countries 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.

As well as looking at individual countries Badoo also categorised the world into nine major regions. Despite the coolness of French women, Badoo’s data show that European women as a whole are the readiest to chat with men online, while Middle Eastern women are the least ready 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.