Washington Post: For many women these days, it’s not “He’s just not that into you” that’s the problem. It’s that “There aren’t enough of him.”
So says Jon Birger, the author of a new book called “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.” The book, which Birger describes as “the least romantic book ever written about dating,” uses demographics, statistics, game theory and other wonky techniques to shed light on the surprising and growing gap between the number of college-educated women and the number of college-educated men.
The main idea is that women have been attending college at much higher rates than men since the 1980s, in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. That has led to a big demographic mismatch for people who want to date and marry others of the same educational level. The dating pool for college-educated people in their 30s now has five women for every four men. For people in their 20s, it’s four women for every three men.
The gap is even more extreme in certain places. In Manhattan, there are 38 percent more female college grads under the age of 25 than college-grad men, according to Birger’s data. The gap is 49 percent in Raleigh, N.C., 86 percent in Miami, 49 percent in Washington and 37 percent in Los Angeles. And it’s not just cities – many rural areas also have these “educated man deficits.”
…As “Date-onomics” shows, this mismatch in the number of college-educated men and women leads to some surprising consequences, affecting not just dating, marriage and fidelity, but campus culture, credit card debt and even pop song lyrics.
…I tend to agree with Claudia Goldin, who is an economist at Harvard. She argues that the big driver for college enrollment is the expectation of future labor force participation. In an era in which women were getting married young and having kids soon after, there wasn’t much of an expectation for long stays in the workforce. Goldin attributes the change to the pill, which allowed women to delay marriage and childbirth. The expectation of spending more time in the workforce made college a better investment.
But how we got to four women for every three men has more to do with biology and neuroscience. Some of the old discrimination obscured what is essentially a fundamental biological truth, that girls mature socially and intellectually faster than boys. Even though boys and girls score comparably on raw intelligence tests, when it comes to actual school work, girls fare much better. Girls are better organized, they’re more likely to be valedictorians. The girls are just better at college preparation.
One of the things I normally write about is the oil industry. If you spend any time in North Dakota, which is the big booming oil state these days, you have kids right out of high school, and 98% are men, earning 50, 60, 70 thousand dollars a year as roughnecks. Those kind of high-paying working class jobs are even harder to come by for women. That’s what makes the college wage premium so much bigger for women, because there are fewer job opportunities to earn a decent wage in blue collar jobs.
What are some of the effects of this imbalance on college campuses?
It’s clear that schools that have more men tend to have more traditional dating situations, whereas the ones that are disproportionately female tend to have more intense hookup cultures. It’s not just the social science I cite in the book, you can really see it in how kids talk about dating life at these schools.
I use data in the book from Niche.com, which is a college review site. At the schools that are predominantly male, the kids talk about how students like to be in relationships. So for Georgia Tech, which is 66% male, the comment on Niche.com was, “Tech is a fairly monogamous campus.” But for the schools that are skewed female, the hookup culture becomes more intense. So James Madison, which is 63 percent female, one comment is, “The deficiency of guys creates a scene that tends to embrace random hookups.”
Less educated men are actually facing as challenging a dating and marriage market as the educated women. So for example, among non-college educated men in the U.S. age 22 to 29, there are 9.4 million single men versus 7.1 million single women. So the lesser-educated men face an extremely challenging data market. They do not have it easy at all…
I think this is a largely a developmental issue. The real issue is that boys lag at least a year behind girls, both intellectually and socially, when it comes to brain maturity. As a result, boys don’t perform as well in school. I do think that if we essentially red-shirted boys and had them begin kindergarten a year later than girls, it would go a long way toward closing this gap. And in fact, the handful of western countries, like Switzerland and Finland, where both boys and girls start school later, tend to have smaller college gender gaps…
Looking at college-educated people age 22-29, the three best cities for men are Fort Lauderdale, Fla, where there are 71 percent more women than men; Providence, R.I., with 60 percent more women than men, and then Portland, Ore., at 56 percent. OKCupid recently named Portland the most promiscuous city in the U.S., and I strongly suspect that’s related to the gender ratio.
