Unless by more likely that not you mean a bit more likely than average relationship between a doctor and a waitress.
EDIT:
I'm sorry. While rephrasing the claim I changed its meaning. Please disregard my comment.
The usual guidance to “mind your own business” doesn’t really work here because who I live with and where is entirely my business.
Age gaps are not an immutable characteristic. Nor are they culturally common in the USA. So they are fair game for discrimination just like any other exercise of free association.
And yet discrimination against people that display those voluntary behaviors would also be strongly frowned upon.
I don't think it's due to some innate nature of gender gaps. It's pure prejudice. "We don't like people like that because we believe people like that are less moral than us."
Maybe the time will come where ageism will raise to the same status as transphobia, but currently as you notice it's far from it.
I'd like to see some research to back that claim that over 50% relationships with significant age gap are exploitative.
These two statements are not identical.
Or are you referring to the difference "significant age gap" vs "30 year old and teenager"?
If so I conceed. Those kinds of relationships are so incredibly rare among all relationships that I have no idea about the statistics there.
I'm not claiming that, I'm claiming that it's a common belief about them.
No, because a relationship between a teenager and someone in their 30s is seen as 'more likely than not to be exploitative'.
I've only known two people who fit that bill, and as a third-party observer, both of them seemed incredibly sleazy and manipulative. I'm sure that there are exceptions, but most people would correctly see that kind of age gap as a huge red flag.