A Bad Break-Up With Tinder

WHITNEY WOLFE may have said goodbye to TINDER, but she went on to found BUMBLE, a feminist dating app that allows women to make the first move

- Ellie Austin

Whitney Wolfe is 10 minutes into having her photograph taken and there is a problem. The (female) photographer wants to try some shots of her reclining on a sofa, but Whitney isn’t buying it. ‘It’s too sexy for me. I want this to be taken seriously,’ she says. ‘Would you put a male CEO on a couch lying down when he’s doing an interview about his business?’ She has a point, but her stance is also indicative of something much broader.

Whitney, 28, landed her first tech job five years ago when she was hired by a Los Angeles incubator to develop ideas for start-ups. One of the launches she worked on was the dating app Tinder, and she eventually became its vice president of marketing. She also began dating its co-founder Justin Mateen. In 2014, as the app’s popularity rocketed (it currently has an estimated 50 million users) things turned sour for Whitney, both professionally and personally. The relationship unravelled and she lost her job, taking Tinder to court for sexual harassment and discrimination (she alleged that she was stripped of the title of co-founder). The lawsuit was settled out of court with neither party admitting wrongdoing. Some saw Whitney as a feminist icon – the public face of a long battle for equality by the women of Silicon Valley – but, inevitably, angry corners of the Internet branded her a gold-digger.

Others might have quietly retreated from an industry that had caused them such public anguish; Whitney returned defiant. Within months of her departure from Tinder, she had launched Bumble, a dating app in which women make the first move. Dubbed ‘the feminist Tinder’, Bumble has more than 18 million users, who spend an average of 90 minutes a day on the app.