Here's some fun with demographics — it's a treasure map! Actually, it's a map of where the excess single men (in blue) and excess single women (in red) are located.
That east-west split is strange, I wonder what the explanation might be?
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It's a grade school dance. They single boys and girls all feel awkward and have each separated to a single side of the gym.
Texas is trying to summon the courage to make the first move but so far is just standing in the middle of the gym looking like an idiot.
Would be interesting to see if there are any local correlations with lifestyle parameters like education, occupation and sexual orientation...
Great. There's a big blue dot smack dab on top of my hometown of Austin.
Okay, I'll say it. I'd rather be in Philadelphia.
Surely the result of "Go West, young man"?
.... I don't care what the explanation is, I've got my bags packed, all I need now is an airline ticket - by the way what sort of weather do they have in Philadelphia ?
Well, I can account for two of the big red dots (Memphis and New Orleans). Look at the demographics, and look at imprisonment rates. Net effect- lots of single women, because a lot of the corresponding single men are in jail and presumably not counted.
As for all the blue in California, I have no idea- maybe differential migration of disproportionately male tech workers?
Probably because the men move west to enjoy the outdoor recreation, while women just want to stay inside and powder their noses and buy shoes or whatever it is they do.
Unfortunately, I'm already in one of the cities with the greatest excess of single women (Chicago). I say "unfortunately" as this just ends up reflecting badly on me when you consider my success so far. Why couldn't my incompetence be masked by the masculinity of LA?
The Mississippi River vwas designed by God to keep us apart to prevent fornicatin'
No wonder i can't meet anyone! I've gotta get the fuck outta Houston.
Prevailing winds. The prevailing winds blow (very roughly) southwest-to-northeast. Women, being on average slightly lighter than men, tend to be swept further downwind.
This, incidentally, is why the few remaining women in the western and southwestern states tend to be very large. Their lighter, more aerodynamic sisters are long gone.
I imagine San Francisco, CA is pretty easy to account for if you think about it for a second.
I think my presence in Boston is making women swear off men forever.
That has to be it.
I mean, correlation equals causation, right?
I wonder how many of the red dots in Florida are over 80.
Maybe a lot of women who wsih to make carreers think the best place to do so is in the east near new ork and the like. The male dominance in the west might be because of the ironically seen was of los angeles. (Hot, lots of bikinis). The small male bump (no pun intended) in florida probably are old guys who's wives have died.
Maybe a corresponing birth rate statictic would shed further light on the situation.
Most polygamous religious sects are located in the West.
Age related? Women outlive men by quite a big margin, so the norm should be to have more women in towns with old-ish populations. But the east/west divide is still a bit puzzling.
Uh, am I the only one noticing that by and large the big blue dots are in cities with exceptionally large gay male populations? seattle, san francisco, LA, houston...
hmmmm. Perhaps demographers need to think more carefully about how they define "single".
Great. There's a big blue dot smack dab on top of my hometown of Austin
Hm, tonight's my last night near Austin on a research trip. Perhaps I need to go into town and hit the bars...
(married! kidding dear, if you see this)
I notice Utah pretty well marries off their folks... surprise surprise.
Or get gay marriage legalized to take care of this artifact...
One of the "excess women" dots in NC is at a large military base. Perhaps the study didn't count their boyfriends who were on the base or had been shipped over seas.
Gayness shouldn't be an explanation. If there are a large number of single gay males in an area, that should also leave large numbers of unattached single females...unless, of course, it's all the gay men leaving the red dots to live in the blue dots. But then you're stuck explaining red New York.
I rather like the aging explanation. I was imagining all the richly browned beautiful girls basking on the Miami beaches, pining away for a manly man or three, but reality may be a bunch of old widows in their apartments pining for their husband of 50 years.
But then...Phoenix? Isn't Phoenix another Mecca for the aged?
HBO apparently already knows this. Notice how Sex and the City (four single women) was set in New York, while Entourage (four single men) was set in Los Angeles?
It's a shame that the map shows the number differential rather than by percentage. That could be a simple explanation for many of the larger dots - they represent an unremarkable statistical tendency, in an area with lots of people. The famously male state of Alaska, on the other hand, looks more balanced than it actually is.
Well the answer is obviously migration, unless there is something in the water. Single men are usually more likely to migrate, and probably mexican immigrants are mostly in the West. Oddly though, female with degrees may well be selectively heading to Eastern cities.
The same sort of thing occurred in Africa. Going by the historical record then, clearly the gender divide is caused by the Europeans and English taking the men away to work in the fields, and the Chinese and the Russians taking away the women as harem girls and household slaves.
Only Texas comes out on top. Which is just the way we like it.
Phoenix and other Arizona towns have sizeable older populations, but the demographic is different. You've got a lot of *active* retirees here who came there for (don't laugh) golfing, baseball (the Cactus and Arizona summer leagues), and other kinds of recreation that tend to appeal to males and (by their participation) promote life extension. Just my two cents....SH
The map would be more interesting if they scaled the dots relative to the total local population. Tens of thousands of excess single men in LA isn't necessarily as big a problem as a lower surplus in a smaller city. Looking at relative numbers would make it more obvious that the single men in Austin are screwed. Or not.
(yes, I'm a bitter single male in Austin)
(who got his last girlfriend by convincing her to move here from another state, appropriately enough...)
Re: East West split
"Culture" vs. Silcon Valley?
I'm going to take a stab:
1) Predominance of women in aging populations, especially on the East Coast, noted by one of the commenters above
2) Relative willingness/propensity of men to relocate for employment (I'm going to get into trouble for this one.)
3) Prevalence of technology and new construction jobs in the larger blue dot cities, most of which seem to be relatively strong economic growth areas compared with the red dot locations.
I haven't seen the original article, but if you expand the map to read the fine print, these numbers appear to be absolute, not relative to population, so I'm not sure how meaningful they really are: 40,000 spare single males is only 0.33% out of a population of 12 million(? more?) in the Los Angeles conurbation.
I'm surprised there aren't more single men in Alaska. I always thought of it as the holy grail...
Well, you know the old saying: "Men are from Nebraska. Women are from Delaware."
Sexually transmitted diseases can have differential effects on the survival of offspring as a function of gender...
I think Reason is looking in the right direction along with age disparity.
more construction & gardening much less manufacturing in the west more work for males, many rental houses in my area are filled with single young men leaving the sex life aside who came here to work in mostly the construction industry.
how do the sats. break down with regards to other criteria, age, education, work life, imagration and migration statis. otherwise the stats are kind of a fun opener for humor but not a lot of usefull information, which is the point of the post right.
My hypothesis:
Lots of men go to L.A. to find the Hollywood dream woman.
They don't find her. Or if they do, the marriage doesn't last.
Sensible women, recognizing that all the dumb, vacuous men have migrated to L.A., stay put on the east coast.
I'M WILLING TO BET...
That the reason why more single men are on the west coast is due to job market demands.
There are probably more men who hold applicable degrees to the tech sector and related fields that California would provide that the east coast does not.
Oddly enough, Boston has a reputation in the media for being one of the best cities for single people out there. I'm just not seeing it.
Then again, I'm pretty much undateable anyway, so I don't have much first-hand experience.
"The Mississippi River vwas designed by God to keep us apart to prevent fornicatin'"
Just like Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn sang about, right?
An age split doesn't make sense. Speaking as a Miami native who lived there most of my life, yeah, there USED to be big senior population on Miami Beach, but they were displaced long ago by a youth/hip/international scene. When I last lived there a few years ago, it was whatever the opposite of a retiree town is. The population is heavily influenced by immigration of (mostly) fairly young Latino families.
If age and spouse die-off were a factor, then the southwest coast of Florida should be heavily red in retirement zones like St. Petersburg, and instead it's blue.
I don't know... it doesn't smell right, especially that huge disproportionate split in Miami.
I think that the blue dominance in large western cities has been explained (lots of jobs in male-dominated fields like construction). It's still not clear to me why major urban areas east of the Mississipi should have more single women.
If you squint and look at the smaller population centers you will note that they don't seem to follow the same pattern. For example, here in central Illinois we have two little red dots and two little blue dots. This clearly supports the migration hypothesis (people do tend to migrate to big cities much more than to smaller communities) as an explanation for the urban east/west divide.
The reason is obvious....
I travel a lot, and mostly on the East Coast.
All these single women are following me around, looking to part me from my wife....
The other guys are simply left behind (as normal)...
;)
I'd be interested to know if some of the red dots (at least the one around Boston) correlate with a particular area being a college town, since it's known that there are more women in higher ed than men. I know when I went to Boston College, the f/m ratio was around 55/45, and I don't know if it's changed much, but I doubt that's terribly non-representative.
The answer to the east west split depends upon who is counted. Census data is not limited to citizens. Large cities and southern border towns are likely showing a blue shift due to immigrant male workers from Latin America. In areas of stable population, the greyer native population will show a red shift due to the greater longevity women enjoy.
Mike
A very detailed explanation of this phenomenon is offered in the February (Valentines Day) issue of National Geographic.
I think the split is due to the fact that the eastern side of the country breeds faster, a la Idiocracy. The birthrate of females vs males has been increasing over the past few decades, hence a prevalence of females on the east side of the country. I'll stop talkin gay now.
Hmph. Largest female plurality area. No wonder I'm not meeting anyone. (Even if it is 185K from a population of what? 16 million? I wonder what it is for NYC itself.)
Maybe the men in the tech centers are simply too geeky to be attractive?
Obviously, single men and single women are trying to get as far away from each other as they can. Perhaps, if you're single past a certain point in your life, there's a reason for it.
*cough*
This is my theory:
Men like to sleep late in the morning. The sun rises later in the West.
Q.E.D.
A few years ago a magazine had an article on how Brazoria County (near Houston) had one of the largest single male populations in the country. It was because of the prisons - there are a bunch of them surrounding Houston. They said single, not single and available. Also, I don't know how those coming from Mexico affect the demographics, but I suspect they do, for California as well.
Single men. Come to DC. You will be adored...
I like how many people are chiming in to say "my love life sucks, (despite/because) of what this map shows." And, well, I have to say the same thing. The only dots in New England are red, and the only dot not counting Boston itself is just a few miles north of me, and yet here I am, single.
FSM damn it. I guess I have to move back East, just when I was getting to like it out here. This does explain how it's near impossible to get a date out here.
Easy to explain the excess of men in LA: guys come up from Mexico to work, leaving their family behind. As a New Yorker, I can't imagine any reason for the excess of women in the East generally.
Not as much as it used to be. Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and Arizona as a whole has a significantly younger population that the rest of the US.
Per the census in 2000, only 11% of the people in Phoenix are over the age of 60, and 49% are between the ages of 25 and 59.
You also have to look at the actual numbers here..the large LA dot represents just 40,000 more men than women.
This is an excellent example of what Edward Tufte calls chartjunk. They're measuring total numbers rather than relative rates.
The LA metro area has a population of approximately 12.9 million; a 40,000 person imbalance means that there's 1.006 males for every female, based on the numbers in the chart. Phoenix has a population of 1.3 million, and the 20,000 male imbalance there comes to 1.063 males for every female, a HIGHER ratio, yet the dot is smaller than LA's.
I have no doubt that the tri-state area's imbalance, though impressively high at 188K more females than males is actually about the same. I'm just too lazy to google the population of that area...
This effect is pretty negligible, any way you look at it.
There's a huge red dot right on top of my hometown.
...I know what I'm doing this summer.
I can vouch for Philly. I've only been here a year and have pretty much met the woman I'm going to marry. Plus before that I would get lots of responses when i would put out a personal ad on craigslist. Had to sift through some psychos but I found my diamond in the rough. Philly girls are awesome too.
But, Kseniya, we set our clocks, and thus live our lives, to offset the difference. At best, the sun can be said to rise later in any area that's on the western edge of a time zone. Like Boise. If you travel to northern Idaho, where they live by Pacific time, the sunsets are about an hour earlier by their clocks than they are in Boise. I like it the Boise way. At this time of year, the sunset is still visible at 10 PM.
But you can also get this sort of effect in places like Indiana and even the central panhandle of Florida.
I didn't really think there was much difference in sleeping in patterns between men and women anyway. *shrug*
"I imagine San Francisco, CA is pretty easy to account for if you think about it for a second."
The chart doesn't say whether it defines "single" and "unmarried" as synonymous, which they aren't. I haven't clicked through the link to find out, but let's assume that's what they're doing.
San Francisco attracts unmarried people of all sorts, not just gay men. We have whole neighborhoods full of lesbians, for example. And the area west of Twin Peaks is a vast suburban sea of breeders. This stereotype of SFO is often trotted out by bigots and homophobes, though occasionally by LGBT-friendly types because, well, SFO has a history of being an LGBT-friendly city of which we are justly proud.
I think the theory that explains the big blue dot over the Bay Area is the migration of disproportionately male technology workers. My whole floor is full of testosterone-fueled East Coast men who can't find wives.
Someone should link that map to Expedia to help people plan their holidays. There seems to be enough demand just on this thread.
I don't seem to know any single people at all any more - maybe that's why Canada has apparently ceased to exist?
BruceJ:
You beat me to it!
Places like Houston are easy enough to explain -- big oil town, not many women are roughnecks.
Places like Austin and San Antonio are a little more puzzling, but someone else mentioned the possibility of counting migrant/undocumented workers, and that makes a little sense. Austin's been growing like a tick, meaning lots of construction, meaning lots of jobs for carpenters, masons, landscapers, etc., drawing them from nearby areas. That's probably not enough to account for the discrepancy, though.
Ok, I have had a bad day but this story's comments made it all go away. I got some good laughs out of this. I especially liked the theory about the prevailing winds. Thanks everyone. Ending the day on a high note.
A friend remarked that the map should be, of course, *pink* and blue.
Likely reason for predominant males on the west coast - Millions from Mexico seeking employment - mostly young men
I was being too flip, probably, in suggesting that gay men are the only reason why the Bay Area would come up skewed to males, and I apologize for that. Though, for chrissakes, it's not like I meant it as though it were a bad thing.
I would be pretty damned surprised if the number of lesbians in the Bay Area were greater than or equal to the number of gay men. Gay men being more common to begin with.
Yah San Diego has either retarded or non single girls...As if I had some what a chance to begin with..
Rey, your eminently reasonable and brazenly insightful analysis has knocked the wind completely out from under my deliberately inane theory! Whatever shall I do?!?
:-)
I could catch heck for saying this, but I think males are much more likely to move long distances for jobs & recreational activities. And migration has been primarily Westward.
The last time I was young and single I was at a very deceptive point on the map; Los Alamos, where the ratio of single men to single women was truly large!
Well, for starters, you could fetch me a Coke.
I look at where the biggest blue circles are, and where the biggest red circles are, and I conclude that women flee from computer geeks.
Unmarried means single and fair game to me:-)
Rey! =:D
Just another thank you for a couple of very big laughs - and a few smaller chuckles.
It doesn't matter that there's a giant blue dot over the Bay Area in CA. Have you seen the single guys here? They're all sporting bowl-cuts and pocket protectors. Ladies, if you like nerdy, horny tech guys then San Jose is the hunting ground for you!
I nominate Comments 1 & 10 for Mollies!
I just examined Louisiana more closely. All the "hot spots" are also college towns.
The "Duckman" animated series had an episode where the United States was divided in half between the sexes:
"The East, known for its culture, was given to the women. The West, known for its cattle, was given to the men."
PZ's classification of single people as "excess" is kind of funny. :) Some of us are actually happily single; I would count as a statistic on a similar sort of map, but that doesn't mean I'm looking to become part of a civilly-recognised pair-bond unit. (That said, where I live, that means opposite-sex marriage, same-sex marriage, and common-law marriage, which encompasses both orientations but doesn't require a license, just a time interval.) But if you're like me and you're with Sartre when he said "Hell is other people," and you're definitely not into having kids, what's the point? :)
Didn't somebody once say "Go west young man!"
Sam Clemens or PT Barnum. Census figures have probably
always shown this. I was offered a job in Alaska when I was single. Ugh, too many men, too few women. Santa Barbara was the place I chose to be. In the 70's a gold mine. Little makeup allowed prediction of what she looked like in the morning. I'm sorry if that sounds sexist but I always believed in WYSIWYG. I'm now in Washington state where pasty pale is back in vogue. I love it. I am now (rare in America) color blind as to race or ethnicity. When people complain about the browning of America I say Yahooo!
There's a lot more pressure on women to stay near their families and not be 'pioneers.'
My east coast family thinks I'm crazy for moving to the pacific northwest. Maybe I should show them this map :)
Hmmm. I seem to have the opposite problem than most - I get more male attention than I'd like here in Chicago as it is. Maybe I should re-think my plan to move to Seattle...
The unofficial Alaskan state motto: The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Assuming that the eass/west distinction is significant (statistically) to any reasonable degree, I'd go with the immigration hypothesis. But that's what it is - a hypothesis.
Ken Mareld:
Horace Greeley. And I'm in a college town with one of the larger blue dots not seen in a major metro area. Great.
For the record: Greeley's "west" was upstate New York.
This is all minor.
Qatar
Sex ratio:
at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 2.211 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 2.887 male(s)/female
total population: 1.852 male(s)/female (2007 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/qa.html
And ladies, if you are considering emigrating, please do a little more research.
And if you are in the LA area, and that desperate, check out the California Institute of Technology instead. When I was there, it was 7:1 (One group Halloween costume was 'Snow White and the Caltech Ratio') and probably hasn't improved much. There was a saying among the women there:
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
ROFL at the unoficial Alaska state motto. That's hilarious.
I think it's a combination of the effect of women fleeing nerds and men fleeing from Sarah Jessica Parker.
That big dot over Rochester, Minnesota is the Mayo Clinic.
That means that there is a large collection of educated single women with high-income potential just waiting to be found. It's only about 85 miles south of Minneapolis.
I think it is time for a summer road trip!
They're single because they work 100-hour weeks. You'll be lucky to get 10 minutes a month with one.
"Ladies, if you like nerdy, horny tech guys then San Jose is the hunting ground for you!"
Don't be hatin' the nerdy, horny tech guys-- not that you are, of course, but-- they're often clueful enough to read the instruction manual, and they can usually find a clitoris without having to ask for directions.
Yes, at Caltech we said "the odds are good" etc about the guys (I never knew it had anything to do with Alaska). The ratio is down to 3:1 or better now, but still not great. The guys had another saying though- the odds are bad and the goods are worse. Made us women feel really loved.
I love how Purdue actually caused a blue dot on the map. Oh the abundance of male engineering students, you make us nerdy girls so happy.
Why not try reading the actual National Geographic article for the most valid hypotheses about why this is the case?
The smart money is on the fact that the majority of illegal immigrants are male (and primary breadwinners for families residing in Mexico and beyond) and make their homes in the western states.
That doesn't seem right to me. I've always heard the town in Colorado was named after him in honor for his encouragement of people coming out here, though being from Colorado it's possible we're overstating the importance of our part of the country to someone back east. Still Greeley seems to be a little late to be encouraging people to be moving to upstate New York.
By the way, while trying to find when Greeley said this I discovered that according to wikipedia (for what that's worth) Greeley used the phrase after John Soule originally wrote it in 1851.
@ speedgraphic,
ummm, because it's more fun to speculate about the reasons and make up funny explanations? Anyhow, I used to live under the red dot in St. Louis, but I never noticed a plethora of single women. That may be because I was on the lookout for single men though. :)
In Wyoming, there's a saying, "Wyoming. Where the men are men, and the sheep are nervous."
Surfers on the west, women in finance on the east.
Hellooo?! totally the shopping!
Well, as a single Seattleite male, I am finding this thoroughly depressing.
But I have to echo the sentiment of the poster above, that although some of the Western surplus male population may have something to do with the tech field, a larger factor is probably the presence of so many migrant workers in areas of the West, doing agriculture and construction work. There seems to be well-known pattern of young unmarried Mexican men coming up here to make some cash and build a nest egg.
All the men came out West in search of gold, the travel in the 1800's was too much for most women and children. This study probably reflects several generations.
Also I think women back East kill and eat their men......
Heheh, just joking!!
Nevada Lights
myspace.com/nevadalights
Simple enough.. uptight women in the east coast can only be compared to geeks in the west coast. For eastern women no one is good enough; for the western boys, life in virtual reality and slavedom under tech companies are the reason. They all want to catch the next google and become millionaire! For Texas, everyone native is married by 21... who the heck is going to pick up the upsurge of men due to oil industry boom and war? So, they stay single. For east coast gals, west coast boys are too sensitive for their taste... so, they try to avoid moving west or move west only when they are married... wow... I am impressed by my own logic! Now it is time to provide a solution: guys in the west coast, it is time to declare your undying love for ps3, x-box and c++. They are your ideal mate... resposive and easy to score! Gals in New York, Boston... there is really no perfect man... read the statistics... you will only find single women around you... so quit searching or become... People in Florida, you should not check single when you are 80!
You know what they say about the men in Alaska:
The odds are good, but the goods are odd....
No offense!
SG
It's because we have meetings. Geesh. You'd think the word would have gotten out by now.
We have meetings and decide what we want to do with our lives and then, when/if we need/want one of you, we let you know.
Nance
Alot of those excess males in Atlanta are enjoying the company of other excess males
speaking from the inside (san francisco resident/gay), i think my crowd accounts for at least some of the split. it might also be interesting to consider how institutions of higher learning are focused east v west. we do not have large numbers of smaller liberal arts colleges out here.
"This is an excellent example of what Edward Tufte calls chartjunk. They're measuring total numbers rather than relative rates."
Chartjunk refers to unnecessarily graphic elements such as shading, cross-hatches, grids, color, etc.
If the map were shown as rates, it would be dwarfed by the smallest towns, which of course have the highest variance of gender ratio.
What I find interesting is that almost every explanation offered has to do with migration (or the effects of wind, etc.). AT this scale, I would think a very large number of people are pretty much where they were born. At the very least, one should consider the indigenous birth factors.
Clearly, the eastern half of the country has a lower condition and the western half a higher condition, thus Trivers-Willard causes more male births in the West and more female births in the East.
A correlation between high tech and males? Perhaps Miami shows a correlation between retirees and the higher life span of women?
I have to get the heck out of Philly and get over to LA!! ASAP!!
I think they miscalculated Charleston, SC. The ratio is 4:1, women. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack to get a date in this town. Or atleast a non-douche-bag date.
posted: non-douchey single male on east coast who prefers salt water to styling gel. willing to travel. haha. i think the lack of blue dots on the e.c. is b/c we're a bit harder to find. and then once we are found, we can't seem to stay single. it's rough over here in charleston...sike. keep masturbating west coast. i'm sure that stripper at the club really did like you more than everyone else and wasn't just saying that for a benjamin...or a george in your case. wanker.
my brother says, "the red dots probably just mean that there are are a lot of fat girls there".
but really, that map is interesting.
Here is a link showing hundreds of correlations with male/female ratios by state:
http://www.orderfromrandomness.com/usa360/?chart=mfmratio+aveelevate+sr…
The ratio is greater in states with higher elevations and less rain. States with greater numbers of men also have higher suicide rates and for some reason, the women in those states tend to breastfeed their children more.
its simple mathematics, san francisco is on the west side.
I'd be intrigued to get a similar plot for the UK - we're much tinier, so it'd be interesting to see if we have a vaguely comparable phenomenon.
Plus, I need to meet more single women.
Why the odd red-blue pairing, the only equal pair I notice side by side --- in Utah? Do they keep they fenced off in adjacent separate areas til marriage?
If you lay this over a map with the pH of rainwater across America you get an interesting correlation.
Great! Im a single girl in California, where a large single male population live. Why can't I find someone decent!?
Im not fat as someone previously speculated as the reason for large population of single women
There ARE lots of single guys here in the Bay Area. It's nice!!!
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So we'd better go to the east coast (I speak for us, men).