Thread: Woman shortage

3 Blogs about women shortage....could that be true? If thats true and you have far more females than males that could only mean one thing: Females demanding more (rich guy, good looking etc.) - males demanding less (I´d take you if you are female)...I wonder I wonder....(note I am not in the dating scene....but what are your experiences?)

It's me who posted the item on Subchat about the Woman Shortage. I believe it is a real phenomenon, albeit one that doesn't affect me personally as I'm married. But then there's always the "butterfly effect scenario," if things had turned out slightly different I might be single and might be experiencing the shortage myself.

What first got me thinking about the shortage was hearing radio ads a couple of years ago for singles' bars and other clubs aimed at a younger set. Almost all of them touted "ladies' nights" in an effort to get more women to attend. The alternative is what's known as a "sausage party," in other words mostly men in attendance. Curious, I did some online research and found out, among other things, that dating sites like Yahoo Personals and e-Harmony.com have *far* more male than female members. A woman who places an ad on one of those sites is likely to get hundreds of
replies, while a man usually will get nothing except for solicitations from hookers. And then you have the huge mail-order bride industry, which caters to men who can't find women through conventional means.

A Woman Shortage can exist despite roughly equal numbers of males and females mostly because women are drawn to so-called Alpha males. This results in
situations I call de facto polygamy and serial monogamy. De facto polygamy exists when an Alpha male is involved with two or even more women at the same
time and therefore takes both "out of circulation." An example might include a studly college fratboy who dates two girls at the same time, with neither girl aware of the other and each of them considering herself taken. Or you can have a married businessman with a mistress on the side. In either way, the Alpha male takes more than his share (i.e. one) of women and leaves non-Alphas scrambling for a diminished number of females.

Serial monogamy occurs when an Alpha male runs through a series of women in fairly rapid order, dumping each one after dating her for a time. This can even occur
in marriages, for instance the CEO who trades in trophy wives in for new models after a couple years' marriage to each. While the dumped women go back into
the dating pool, the problem is that many women take some time to get over broken relationships and therefore aren't available to other men for weeks or even months after being dumped - meanwhile, the Alpha is out snagging more women. Even worse, a woman who's dated an Alpha, even one who's dumped her, might be unwilling to settle for lesser men.

I hope this answered your curiosity. I am convinced that the Woman Shortage is real, and getting worse. How this will affect our culture in the years to come
remains a big unknown.

Peter Rosa's letter on the woman shortage disturbed me - seriously - so I'm trying to get to the bottom of this. I suspect that no definitive answer is available, because we are talking about a mixture of at least a couple of different trends happening at the same time. For one, demographics and the sex ratio. For another, we're looking at several phenomena which Peter described so well: that women want alpha males, that these alphas often have more than one woman simultaneously (whether a married man and a mistress, or a single man dating more than one woman), while women take a lot of time getting back into the dating pool while alphas are back at it immediately.

The demographics are rather straightforward. Here is the U.S. Census data on sex ratios for American cities, with Santa Ana, California having the highest number of males to females. (Think illegal immigrants, largely men.) Oakland, California has the lowest, due to the large black population, in which the men are incarcerated or dead a lot younger. Some of the ratios must be interpreted: for example, San Francisco has a relatively high male/female ratio, but lots of the men are gay, and in fact I've heard that SF is actually a great place for straight men, because the high number of gays leaves plenty of single women looking for a straight guy.

So far, so good. The alpha male phenomenon is harder to quantify. An article in the Christian Science Monitor uses anecdotal evidence that quite a few men are concerned about a shortage of available women.

It's not just the reported rush toward couplehood, but men's prospects, too, that is making news. The Wall Street Journal recently used birth rates and census figures to predict a shortage of marriage-age women in the next 10 years for guys who are in their 30s and 40s. Currently, it said, numbers of single men and single women ages 30 to 44 are about the same.

That story caught the eye of many men - some of whom say they don't believe it. "There's [already] a shortage of marriage-age women who are not completely psychotic," quips Peter Shankman, a public-relations consultant in New York, who jokingly says the story was probably the result of a slow news day.

Doing the math

But professionals who study or counsel single people are giving heed to the report, trying to present the single man's side of things and help flesh out the statistics.

Predicting ratios of single men and women is complicated, say researchers, and includes marriage rates and environmental factors as well as raw numbers. It's difficult to predict what will happen with gender ratios in the future, but for now, they say, men shouldn't worry.

"There are still plenty of women for the men at the young end of the baby-boom generation," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, codirector of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The pool of single, college-educated women, in particular, "isn't shrinking," she says. "It's getting larger each year, albeit at a slower rate than 10 years ago."

Still, pairing off single men and women isn't without its difficulties. While some men are content as singles, others complain of feeling invisible - not invited to social or family activities with married couples, for example, unless it's to be fixed up with one of their single friends, says Helene Stein, a psychologist who writes a column for The Boston Globe. She also confirms what others say: that men network less than women do, and, like their female counterparts, find it difficult to meet single, likeable people as they get older.

An article on Online Dating Insider discusses the sex ratio of dating sites, and the news is not good (for men):

One of the facts of online dating is that there are more men than women online. For example, Match.com recently told ABC News that 59% of their subscribers are men and 41% are women. You can confirm the ratio yourself by doing searches for profiles.

The high male/female ratio of online dating is not the fault of the online dating services, but it reflects the unfortunate realities of the real world. Over a decade ago I recall reading a New York Times article that stated that there were approximately 6 single men in their twenties for every five single women.

How is this possible? Aren't there an approximately equal number of boy and girl babies born each year? The biggest contributor to the skewed ratio is serial polygamy. A man in his twenties marries a woman in her twenties, then in his thirties he divorces her and marries another woman in her twenties, then in his forties he marries another women in her twenties. This happens. I have a friend who's in his fifties and his current wife is in her twenties.

(You can read a discussion of this at SubChat)
An interesting point made at a couple of places is that the sex ratio at birth skews toward males, with 105 born for every 100 females. This isn't new, but what is new is that with modern medicine, more males are making it to adulthood. Against this, one has to balance the greater number of men who are subject to social pathologies and thus take themselves out of circulation via imprisonment, addiction, and death due to crime, drugs, heart disease, etc. What those numbers are I don't know, but I have heard that the chance of a black woman finding a suitable match is grim.

Then there's interracial matches. Black/white couples are highly skewed towards a black man and white woman, with something like 75% in that form. For White/Asian couples, that's reversed. But the end result may be a wash, although anecdotally I'd say I see far more white men with Asian women than black men with white women.

What's a single man to do? One item that immediately suggests itself is: move to an area with a better sex ratio. If you're a single man you don't want to be in Alaska. San Francisco and Manhattan would seem to offer far better prospects. In fact, almost any large city will have a greater number of eligible women than rural areas, because women tend to move from the country to the city in greater numbers than men.

I don't have any striking conclusion to report, but it does seem that if you're a single man and are 1) non-alpha, and 2) live in the wrong place, you might have a big problem finding an eligible woman.

Update:
Half Sigma has more data and commentary. The Woman Shortage is starting to look very real.

The Woman Shortage

Dennis Mangan has some posts about the Woman Shortage.
I've known about this phenomenon for a long time, but this is the first I knew that it had a name with capital letters.
There are 105 boy babies for every 100 girl babies (at least I assume this based on the male to female ratio of ages 0 to 5 in the US Census).
The ratio of single (defined as separated or not married) men to single women in lower age brackets becomes even larger because of serial polygamy, which is the tendency of some older men to divorce and marry a lot younger.
Using the 2000 U.S. Census data, and looking only at respondents who claimed to be white, in the age bracket of 18-29, there are 119 single men for every 100 single women.
It doesn't get much better for men in their thirties. For white people aged 30-39, there are 117 single men for every 100 single women.
As we see, dating life is much harder for under-40-year-old men than it is for women.

This Woman Shortage thing is becoming a major obsession with me, to the point where it's actually beginning to interfere with my life. But to prove that it's not just a figment of my imagination, I offer the following item from the "Online Dating Insider" blog. At least the situation in Manhattan is not as dire as in most parts of the country, I'll admit that:

The male/female ratio of online dating
One of the facts of online dating is that there are more men than women online. For example, Match.com recently told ABC News that 59% of their subscribers are men and 41% are women. You can confirm the ratio yourself by doing searches for profiles.
The high male/female ratio of online dating is not the fault of the online dating services, but it reflects the unfortunate realities of the real world. Over a decade ago I recall reading a New York Times article that stated that there were approximately 6 single men in their twenties for every five single women.
How is this possible? Aren't there an approximately equal number of boy and girl babies born each year? The biggest contributor to the skewed ratio is serial polygamy. A man in his twenties marries a woman in her twenties, then in his thirties he divorces her and marries another woman in her twenties, then in his forties he marries another women in her twenties. This happens. I have a friend who's in his fifties and his current wife is in her twenties.
There is also parallel polygamy. My sister, when she was in her twenties, knew a guy who had two girlfriends at the same time (neither, of course, knew of the other one's existence). And at the same time he was also hitting on my sister, trying to bring his harem up to three!
What's going on in the real world is reflected in the virtual world of online dating. In fact, it's skewed worse than in the real world, because online dating sites attract a much greater percentage of people who have trouble finding dates. So not only will there be more men, there will be more undesirable (for whatever reasons) members of both sexes.
Men who use online dating services will initially try to contact the few women they are interested in. But because the desirable women receive more emails than they can respond to, male subscribers eventually figure out that they have to send out massive numbers of emails because the response rate is so low. So we wind up in the situation we're in now. Female subscribers to online dating services receive more emails than they can respond to, and male subscribers send out large numbers of emails and rarely get a response.
Women actually complain about this, but I think they are in a far better situation than men. If you are a man, how do you fix the problem? The answer is that you need to move to Manhattan. There are more single women in Manhattan than men. If you do searches in Match.com for Manhattan, you will find about 50% more female profiles than male profiles. The opposite of the ratio for the rest of the United States.
Living in Manhattan and using Match.com, I've been quite happy with how many women respond to my emails. And being a nerdy IT professional, I'm not a high priority catch for most women. They'd rather be going out with the good looking athletic men. You also get to meet women of a caliber you'd never find in Phoenix, Arizona, like graduates of Harvard and Yale law schools.