Comments on: Towards a better Singles Map (?)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:33:19 +0000

One thing to keep in mind is that the dating process can exacerbate even modest differences. For example, Lets say in a given area there were 55 women and 45 men. Now suppose that of those there are 25 of each currently dating each other. This leaves 30 women and 20 men looking, which is a substantially different ratio. Of course this is a bit simplistic of a way to describe it. But having gone to a college with a skewed gender ratio, I can assure you this sort of thing does happen.

By: Single Florida

Single Florida — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:46:29 +0000

That’s some interesting information. It does seem a little odd that there would be an overwhelming distribution of one gender being single in a given state or area. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:18:32 +0000

The American Community Survey data tells us how many people have never been married, are separated, widowed, or divorced. But since it doesn’t say how many out of those are currently in a serious relationship, the number of singles based on those data will always be a bit too high. Consequently, the true ratios should be even more skewed than what we can gather.

By: Emily

Emily — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:05:24 +0000

You may not like Florida’s data visualization method, but using a different one for your graph makes it rather difficult to compare the plots.

By: Joe Williams

Joe Williams — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:17:22 +0000

The description seems to imply that this data includes married creative class people along with the singles. Once one excludes married (and strong monogamous relationship) couples, the differential effects are magnified.

If one goes to a dance club in San Jose (48% female by your stats), one finds approximately ten unpaired men for every one unpaired woman. In Boston I’ve noticed the reverse.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:40:12 +0000

This look is interesting but flawed.

More women than men go to college everywhere in the US for a variety of reasons. This tendency is especially strong in African American and other minority demographics. But women with B.A.’s can marry men without degrees and vice versa. These ratios have more to say about regional variation in educational patterns than dating. There might be an interesting study in relating these numbers to regional opportunities for male-dominated well-paying blue collar substitutes for professional jobs, though.

Using ratios is a good idea, but it needs to be done with populations unbiased by educational status. And it would be best to include only single people; most married people are not in the dating market.

Also, people over 45 years of age can be creative and also make great lovers, contrary to your implication.

By: Michael R. Bernstein

Michael R. Bernstein — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:04:14 +0000

Thanks for doing this analysis. Unfortunately for me, most of the areas I’m interested in (Albuquerque, Tucson, and Boulder for example) aren’t included in the top 50. Can you expand the number of metropolitan areas you’re analyzing?

By: MPS

MPS — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:25:11 +0000

I’m glad someone finally did the ratio-based analysis of the singles map, rather than absolute numbers. Interesting that there aren’t the huge disparities that are implied in the absolute singles map. However, it seems there are still some regional patterns (however muted) that emerge in the ratio-based analysis:

Female-leaning metros seem to predominate in the larger Old South cities (Memphis, Birmingham, Richmond, Norfolk), the Rust Belt (St. Louis, Baltimore), and the working-class-leaning areas of the Sunbelt (San Antonio, Riverside, Oklahoma City).

The more male-leaning metros seem to be the creative-class parts of the west coast (SF, SJ, Seattle), the white-collar-leaning sunbelt (Houston, DFW, Austin, SLC), and the Midwest’s two metros (Indy & Columbus) which most closely resemble their white-collar-leaning sunbelt counterparts. Las Vegas is a bit of an outlier as it’s an uber-sunbelt metro but does not really have a deep white-collar base as the other ones. I believe this may be a lot of otherwise educated males chasing real estate development opportunities during the housing bubble (at least from anecdotal evidence: I have a high school friend who built his career in video game programming in California and NY, and then took his wealth to build a real estate business in LV; however he was married with kids at the time). I think a similar phenomenon may have taken place in the housing bubble metros of Florida, particularly areas like Naples, Sarasota, Melbourne, etc.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:13:39 +0000

Thanks. Good work.

Are these ratios for just single people 18-44 with diplomas or all people 18-44 with diplomas. (Including married people wouldn’t change the rank order of metropolises but it would affect the ratios.)

The metropolitan areas with a high ratio of female to male college graduates tend to be heavily black and/or Hispanic. There has been in recent years a high ratio of female to male college graduates among those minorities. In contrast, among whites and Asians, there has been more equality between the sexes in college graduation rates.

Also, it looks like highly military metropolises like San Antonio and Newport News may trend high on this female to male ratio among college graduates. Perhaps the sons of military men and retired military men are more likely to enlist right out of high school, and the those areas have more military men and thus more sons of military men? Say that 50% of the sons of military men enlisted versus 10% of the sons of nonmilitary men and 20% of the daughters of military men enlisted versus 2% of the daughters of non-military men. Thus, a place like San Antonio that ranks high in terms of military men would have a lot of families where, say, the son enlisted and the daughter got a college degree.