Tracking Age Difference in The Bachelor Franchise — Data Viz

Emmanrubin
2 min readApr 8, 2021

Over a year ago, The Bachelor franchise announced Clare Crawley as their new bachelorette. It was the first time a woman in her upper-30s had been cast as a lead. Meanwhile, male leads in their upper-30s have been a mainstay throughout the production of The Bachelor.

Fans of the show are already familiar with these patterns. While there’ve been male leads in their mid-20s, bachelor selection has skewed older while bachelorettes are often younger and under 30. Through data, I wanted to take a closer look at another aspect of age in bachelor casting, specifically the age difference between leads and their contestants.

This first chart compares the age of the lead to the average age of their contestants. When older bachelors are cast, the average contestant age doesn’t catch up, rather the age gap widens.

Bachelorettes meanwhile often have a cast that is, on average, older than them. This is never the case for a bachelor season, even in the early seasons not included in this dataset.

The next chart narrows in on age differences between the lead and their finalist. In the case of Jason, Arie and Peter, both the original finalist and the one they reconnected with post-show are included.

This graph shows how bachelors are more likely to pick a contestant younger than them. Bachelorettes are more mixed with most age differences between leads and contestants being smaller than bachelors.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with age difference in relationships of course. I wanted to explore this data because The Bachelor, as a major network television show, both reflects and influences what kinds of age differences are normalized throughout our culture.

Even if terms like cougar feel increasingly dated, there are still many double standards surrounding age differences in relationships. Within the bachelor bubble, Clare Crawley represented a shift, but the jury’s still out on whether bachelor production will cast a similar-age female lead in the future.

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Emmanrubin

Blogging about random things that I feel like blogging about