You’ve heard it before but now there’s data to back it up: There are more single men than single women in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area.
The new maps, created by Richard Florida and the Martin Prosperity Institute (and published by CityLab), sought to update data from a National Geographicarticle about the same topic published eight years ago. Using data from the American Community Survey, the map shows that there's tons of single men ready to mingle.
Florida’s team breaks down the maps into several age groups, with only one bracket having more single women than men on the West Coast — ages 45-64 has more than 140,000 single women in Los Angeles alone. But if you’re between the ages of 18 and 44, you’ll find all of the single men asking you to put a ring on it (if you're a straight woman, that is). And when the team looked across the board from ages 18 to 64, data shows that in San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, there are over 20,000 more single men to claim your own. Just in time for Valentine's Day, right?
Check out the maps below:
However, if you’re a single, straight dude on the East Coast, you probably already know there's plenty of women to ask out for drinks — about 230,000 more women, in fact, although that only includes the data grouping ages 18 to 64. When the maps break down in those age brackets, there are more single men ages 18-34 on the East Coast. It then flips back to more single women than men between ages 35-64.
A caveat: The data does not control some important variables such as people who identify as LGBT. And if you’re a stickler for really understanding data, Florida has posted maps normalized for population. One last reminder: The American Community Survey is not like the census count. It only surveys a small segment of the population every year rather than the entirety every 10 years.
By the way, this isn't to say that dating is actually easier in SF or being single isn’t awesome. You do you.
[Via CityLab; top photo courtesy of Thinkstock]
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