In the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.

Imagine for a second that you are one of the users whom Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.

The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”

The team combined all that data by using the PageRank algorithm, the same software that helps inform Google’s search results. It found that—insofar as dating “leagues” are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.

The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”

“Reply rates [to the average message] are between 0 percent and 10 percent,” she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.

Michael Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Stanford who was not connected to this study, agreed that persistence was a good strategy. “The idea that persistence pays off makes sense to me, as the online-dating world has a wider choice set of potential mates to choose from,” he told me in an email. “The greater choice set pays dividends to people who are willing to be persistent in trying to find a mate.”

Of the study as a whole, he said: “I think its conclusions are robust and its methodologies are sound.”

Yet what also emerges from the data is a far more depressing idea of “leagues” than many joking friends would suppose. Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.