male-female ratio and dating

Here are a couple charts examining why it can be misleading to look at male-female ratios and conclude that someplace — like New York — is good or bad for dating.

Basically, in the United States for the past 60 years, for every 1,000 girls born there’s been between 1,046 to 1,059 boys born. In just about every country around the world, more boys are born than girls. Overall around the world there’s 106.8 boys aged 0-4 for every 100 girls, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates. But the United States as a whole was just 49.1 percent male — or at least was at the time of the 2010 Census, which pegged the population 309,349,689 — 152.1 million males and 157.2 million females. Women and girls, it seems, are less “fragile” than men and boys. Women are less likely to die in accidents and less likely to drop dead of heart attacks.

Here’s what happens as a result:

Here’s another way of looking at the data:

Basically males outnumber females in the United States until age 30… from then on, women outnumber men.

This is the same exact chart except as a percentage, rather than a ratio:

Basically, when people (here’s looking at you, ladies) complain about the gender ratio of a given area when it comes to dating, see if you can get a breakdown by age. You may be surprised!

Population numbers can be tricky!

UPDATE 11/26/2012: Here’s another way to think about this: According to the American Community Survey, there were 66,225,945 males aged 0-30 in 2008-2010 … and 63,615,468 females. But looking at people over 30, there were 84,069,986 males, and 91,194,878 females. So there was 2,610,477 “excess” males 30 and under, and 7,124,892 “excess” females aged over 30. In percentage terms, the 30-and-under population was 51.01% male during those years, while the 31-and-over population was just 47.97% male. (Not that there are huge differences in the male and female populations among people in their 30s, but it’s at age 30 that the crossover occurs).