4 ms·

Online Dating in the Bay Area, Gender Ratios by City and Age – Match.com

56 points by swimfar 8y ago

krschultz 8y ago
I'm sure NYC looks better than these cities, but I'm not sure by how much if the stats are through the lens of a dating app rather than the overall population.
lettergram 8y ago
On mobile it's basically unviewable. Gotta say, I wasn't expecting Boulder to have a worse ratio
- romed 8y ago
  What's Boulder's deal?
- makewavesnotwar 8y ago
  Tableau has removed the view entirely so I can't even see the broken views your talking about but regarding Boulder... It doesn't have a worse ratio (assuming you're talking about the gender ratio the bay - though this is partially because the town is still small enough that CU Boulder augments gender ratios for its age groups). But the deal is, I'm a young single Boulderite and there's no chance I would sign up for Match.com... Conventional dating is easy in Boulder and I'm more inclined to have a "how-we-met" story of how our eyes met across a crowded coffee shop or we both got bamboozled by the joke of a hilarious vendor at the farmers market, then to tell people I chose to have software help because I'm too busy for traditional romance or am too helpless/hopeless to do it myself. Per the title, this is only a representation of online dating. Match.com is simply a poor representation for the actual singles population here because nobody wants to use it.
beamatronic 8y ago
Head to the DC area if you want to flip the ratio.
- drewmate 8y ago
  I've never lived in that part of the country. What is it about that area (government jobs, other industries) that make it imbalanced toward women?
  - dnautics 8y ago
    while more women are graduating from college, vastly more are graduating with social sciences and polysci degrees. If you would like a well-paying stable job with a degree in one of those two, government is an awfully nice choice.
- plants 8y ago
  Alternatively, head to the DC area if you want to live in a city of class presidents.
  - DavidSJ 8y ago
    Also a city of classless presidents.
xaranke 8y ago
Without context on how this data was gathered it's mostly meaningless.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  > Without context this is meaningless. In the context of the match.com dating app, in these cities, in these age brackets, the gender ratios are as shown. There you go. Meaning!
BadassFractal 8y ago
Dating in these cities as a single man in your 20s and 30s is good for the soul. It forces you to actually develop a personality, figure out how to be fun to be around. Have something interesting going on for you besides working at startup x or being Senior Frontend Engineer at Uber #775. Women in a city like SF expect more from you, they're not that impressed with money or the fact that you have a stable job. Some look at it as a disadvantage, but is actually an upside. Some men come out of the experience jaded and bitter, blaming "the 49ers" and the ratio. Others take it as an opportunity to step it up and have more to offer to a potential partner. You attract who you are. Disclaimer: huge generalizations above, take with a pound of salt.
- jsharf 8y ago
  This is really just trying way too hard to make the best of a shit situation. I know what you're saying, but consider the implications that this argument has for women in the bay area. So as a straight man, fierce competition presumably "forces you to develop a personality" (I think this is actually a pretty dangerous thought in that it suggests that single guys are lacking something in their personality which would net them a girlfriend). So after all this self improvement, it's so that you can meet women who don't have the same driving forces, and actually have quite the opposite -- they can just choose not to date you because you have a funny haircut or they aren't sure and don't feel like following up. That mismatch of effort is a great way to drive resentment on both sides. I'm not trying to place blame here. All I'm saying is: if you're a single straight male in the bay area, it's probably just the gender ratio of your social circle and social habits. Don't turn blame inwards towards perceived personality defects. In a different city or different friend group you might get drastically different results
  - ben_jones 8y ago
    I do turn inward when I think of things like "why I'm single": personality, my social circle is almost entirely co-workers, I spend a most of my time working or playing video games, I work out a little but not enough, etc. The reality is that I can change these habits if I really want to change the outcome. It feels bad sometimes, but it's the reality whether its "right" or "wrong".
woolvalley 8y ago
I wonder what the ratios are on other apps. Do specific apps have different gender and age cohorts? Probably.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  My perception is that few millennials and younger even bother with dating sites anymore. Dating apps, yes, but not legacy dating sites like Match.com. I haven't bothered with dating for a few years, but my brief experience with Match.com is that you're basically paying them to provide you with a bunch of fake profiles that superficially look higher quality than one might find on OkCupid or Tinder. Even when it came to OkCupid, there was virtually nobody on it, and I was living in a metropolitan area. My guess would be the gender ratios wouldn't look that different for other sites and apps, though Match.com clearly skews a little older because it's people 25 or older who are going to remember that it even exists.
xupybd 8y ago
Is this something unique to the bay area? Does this reflect the overall gender ratios in the area?
- romed 8y ago
  At the last census the Bay Area was 50.4% female and SF in particular was 49.3% female, so no this does not reflect overall gender ratios.
sjg007 8y ago
NYC, DC, Vancouver are all places where there are more females than males. If you are a guy it's way better odds. If you are in the Bay area, maybe find a company with a balance as well (hard to do).
nradov 8y ago
SF also had a skewed gender ratio during the 1849 gold rush. History repeats itself.
jurassic 8y ago
Can anybody weigh in on why Boulder is so skewed? I was expecting San Francisco to have the most imbalance because of the tech-dominated economy, but it looks like it's relatively more balanced than any of these other cities. That this doesn't line up with my expectations makes me question the data. I kinda doubt these ratios are actually representative of the overall population of these cities. A quick google search turned up this page which claims to be using Census data and shows a fairly even gender ratio (scroll down to view the Population Pyramid): http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-pop... Maybe the point of the OP's data is to show men that subscription fees may be a poor value if relatively few women are using the platform in their cities.
- juskrey 8y ago
  Online dating is a small subset of real world dating, so doesn't have any connection with gender ratio etc. E.g. in SF women are more readily using online dating to hunt for better prospects, since more of them are there.
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    "small subset" may be no longer the case, I can't find the chart I was looking for, but I believe last time I checked it was around 40% of all relationships. The numbers may be even higher in 2018.
gertlex 8y ago
The link seems to be linking to a comparison of several major cities, not bay area cities. The correct link appears to be: https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comBayAreaDating/Dashboard1 https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome... (And to compare, with where the current link is taking me: https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comDatingbyCityandAge/Relocation https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome...) Looks like the term Man Jose is valid to some degree within these data.
- swimfar 8y ago
  Yeah, I should have verified the link. Thanks. Original source: https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dating_in_the_bay_area_gender_ratios_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dati...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tempo987654321 8y ago
Gay person’s perspective: Even in the worst case, a straight man’s dating pool is so much larger I’m envious. Also something to consider: When 2 straight people couple off, it’s only -1 from the dating pool as far as other straight people are concerned. But when a gay couple exits the dating pool, there’s a loss of 2 people, heightening competition for an already tiny pool.
- 103djeieksow383 8y ago
  Yeah but gay sex is so easy to come by. Open up Manhunt or Grindr with dick pics galore.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  I don't quite follow the math. Why would only 1 person exit the pool in the one case and 2 in the other?
  - dmonitor 8y ago
    In the gay case, both people who left the dating pool are potential mates. In the straight case, only one potential mate left.
rl3 8y ago
It'd be interesting to know gender ratios as they exist at specific levels of attractiveness. Since you can't really objectively measure that, the next best thing would be via something like Tinder's internal ELO score it assigns each user. Distribution of ELO across genders would also be interesting. I've often heard statements like "the top n% of [gender] are fought over by x-y% of [gender]". As an aside, I really loathe the fact that part of the optimal route for finding romance these days seems to be surrendering oneself to a collection of proprietary/black-box algorithms.
- tuesdayrain 8y ago
  > As an aside, I really loathe the fact that part of the optimal route for finding romance these days seems to be surrendering oneself to a collection of proprietary/black-box algorithms. I actually love that online dating is now the optimal method of finding romance. The only reason that wasn't the case before is because we didn't even have that option. You're still free to try the older methods, but online dating is far more efficient in my experience. The dating pool is effectively global and you can be as selective and honest as you want without the awkwardness that comes with dating someone in a close circle of yours.
  - rl3 8y ago
    Oh, I agree entirely. My only qualm is that in terms of online dating, people have essentially no choice but to submit themselves to systems where the inner workings are either not known or poorly designed. Yet, it's what everyone uses, and to abstain is to drastically reduce one's exposure. The way Tinder seems to work for example, the broader an appeal you have, the higher your score. That can really suck for LGBTQ people depending on what gender they're looking for matches with. An openly bisexual male for example, will be met with a huge score penalty due to all the left swipes from women that he isn't concerned with in the first place. Most could be vastly less attractive, or in some geographies even bigoted. The women he is looking for however, have a lower chance of seeing him because of the score hit. It's perverse incentivization all around.
purplezooey 8y ago
What, dudes just give up after 60? something seems off
ldoroud 8y ago
The link seems to be broken?

56 points by swimfar 8y ago

I'm sure NYC looks better than these cities, but I'm not sure by how much if the stats are through the lens of a dating app rather than the overall population.

lettergram 8y ago

On mobile it's basically unviewable. Gotta say, I wasn't expecting Boulder to have a worse ratio

romed 8y ago
What's Boulder's deal?
makewavesnotwar 8y ago
Tableau has removed the view entirely so I can't even see the broken views your talking about but regarding Boulder... It doesn't have a worse ratio (assuming you're talking about the gender ratio the bay - though this is partially because the town is still small enough that CU Boulder augments gender ratios for its age groups). But the deal is, I'm a young single Boulderite and there's no chance I would sign up for Match.com... Conventional dating is easy in Boulder and I'm more inclined to have a "how-we-met" story of how our eyes met across a crowded coffee shop or we both got bamboozled by the joke of a hilarious vendor at the farmers market, then to tell people I chose to have software help because I'm too busy for traditional romance or am too helpless/hopeless to do it myself. Per the title, this is only a representation of online dating. Match.com is simply a poor representation for the actual singles population here because nobody wants to use it.

beamatronic 8y ago

Head to the DC area if you want to flip the ratio.

drewmate 8y ago
I've never lived in that part of the country. What is it about that area (government jobs, other industries) that make it imbalanced toward women?
- dnautics 8y ago
  while more women are graduating from college, vastly more are graduating with social sciences and polysci degrees. If you would like a well-paying stable job with a degree in one of those two, government is an awfully nice choice.
plants 8y ago
Alternatively, head to the DC area if you want to live in a city of class presidents.
- DavidSJ 8y ago
  Also a city of classless presidents.

xaranke 8y ago

Without context on how this data was gathered it's mostly meaningless.

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
> Without context this is meaningless. In the context of the match.com dating app, in these cities, in these age brackets, the gender ratios are as shown. There you go. Meaning!

BadassFractal 8y ago

Dating in these cities as a single man in your 20s and 30s is good for the soul. It forces you to actually develop a personality, figure out how to be fun to be around. Have something interesting going on for you besides working at startup x or being Senior Frontend Engineer at Uber #775. Women in a city like SF expect more from you, they're not that impressed with money or the fact that you have a stable job. Some look at it as a disadvantage, but is actually an upside. Some men come out of the experience jaded and bitter, blaming "the 49ers" and the ratio. Others take it as an opportunity to step it up and have more to offer to a potential partner. You attract who you are. Disclaimer: huge generalizations above, take with a pound of salt.

jsharf 8y ago
This is really just trying way too hard to make the best of a shit situation. I know what you're saying, but consider the implications that this argument has for women in the bay area. So as a straight man, fierce competition presumably "forces you to develop a personality" (I think this is actually a pretty dangerous thought in that it suggests that single guys are lacking something in their personality which would net them a girlfriend). So after all this self improvement, it's so that you can meet women who don't have the same driving forces, and actually have quite the opposite -- they can just choose not to date you because you have a funny haircut or they aren't sure and don't feel like following up. That mismatch of effort is a great way to drive resentment on both sides. I'm not trying to place blame here. All I'm saying is: if you're a single straight male in the bay area, it's probably just the gender ratio of your social circle and social habits. Don't turn blame inwards towards perceived personality defects. In a different city or different friend group you might get drastically different results
- ben_jones 8y ago
  I do turn inward when I think of things like "why I'm single": personality, my social circle is almost entirely co-workers, I spend a most of my time working or playing video games, I work out a little but not enough, etc. The reality is that I can change these habits if I really want to change the outcome. It feels bad sometimes, but it's the reality whether its "right" or "wrong".

woolvalley 8y ago

I wonder what the ratios are on other apps. Do specific apps have different gender and age cohorts? Probably.

ravenstine 8y ago
My perception is that few millennials and younger even bother with dating sites anymore. Dating apps, yes, but not legacy dating sites like Match.com. I haven't bothered with dating for a few years, but my brief experience with Match.com is that you're basically paying them to provide you with a bunch of fake profiles that superficially look higher quality than one might find on OkCupid or Tinder. Even when it came to OkCupid, there was virtually nobody on it, and I was living in a metropolitan area. My guess would be the gender ratios wouldn't look that different for other sites and apps, though Match.com clearly skews a little older because it's people 25 or older who are going to remember that it even exists.

xupybd 8y ago

Is this something unique to the bay area? Does this reflect the overall gender ratios in the area?

romed 8y ago
At the last census the Bay Area was 50.4% female and SF in particular was 49.3% female, so no this does not reflect overall gender ratios.

sjg007 8y ago

NYC, DC, Vancouver are all places where there are more females than males. If you are a guy it's way better odds. If you are in the Bay area, maybe find a company with a balance as well (hard to do).

nradov 8y ago

SF also had a skewed gender ratio during the 1849 gold rush. History repeats itself.

jurassic 8y ago

Can anybody weigh in on why Boulder is so skewed? I was expecting San Francisco to have the most imbalance because of the tech-dominated economy, but it looks like it's relatively more balanced than any of these other cities. That this doesn't line up with my expectations makes me question the data. I kinda doubt these ratios are actually representative of the overall population of these cities. A quick google search turned up this page which claims to be using Census data and shows a fairly even gender ratio (scroll down to view the Population Pyramid): http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-population/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-pop... Maybe the point of the OP's data is to show men that subscription fees may be a poor value if relatively few women are using the platform in their cities.

juskrey 8y ago
Online dating is a small subset of real world dating, so doesn't have any connection with gender ratio etc. E.g. in SF women are more readily using online dating to hunt for better prospects, since more of them are there.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  "small subset" may be no longer the case, I can't find the chart I was looking for, but I believe last time I checked it was around 40% of all relationships. The numbers may be even higher in 2018.

gertlex 8y ago

The link seems to be linking to a comparison of several major cities, not bay area cities. The correct link appears to be: https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comBayAreaDating/Dashboard1 https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome... (And to compare, with where the current link is taking me: https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comDatingbyCityandAge/Relocation https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome...) Looks like the term Man Jose is valid to some degree within these data.

swimfar 8y ago
Yeah, I should have verified the link. Thanks. Original source: https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dating_in_the_bay_area_gender_ratios_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dati...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tempo987654321 8y ago

Gay person’s perspective: Even in the worst case, a straight man’s dating pool is so much larger I’m envious. Also something to consider: When 2 straight people couple off, it’s only -1 from the dating pool as far as other straight people are concerned. But when a gay couple exits the dating pool, there’s a loss of 2 people, heightening competition for an already tiny pool.

103djeieksow383 8y ago
Yeah but gay sex is so easy to come by. Open up Manhunt or Grindr with dick pics galore.
cabaalis 8y ago
I don't quite follow the math. Why would only 1 person exit the pool in the one case and 2 in the other?
- dmonitor 8y ago
  In the gay case, both people who left the dating pool are potential mates. In the straight case, only one potential mate left.

rl3 8y ago

It'd be interesting to know gender ratios as they exist at specific levels of attractiveness. Since you can't really objectively measure that, the next best thing would be via something like Tinder's internal ELO score it assigns each user. Distribution of ELO across genders would also be interesting. I've often heard statements like "the top n% of [gender] are fought over by x-y% of [gender]". As an aside, I really loathe the fact that part of the optimal route for finding romance these days seems to be surrendering oneself to a collection of proprietary/black-box algorithms.

tuesdayrain 8y ago
> As an aside, I really loathe the fact that part of the optimal route for finding romance these days seems to be surrendering oneself to a collection of proprietary/black-box algorithms. I actually love that online dating is now the optimal method of finding romance. The only reason that wasn't the case before is because we didn't even have that option. You're still free to try the older methods, but online dating is far more efficient in my experience. The dating pool is effectively global and you can be as selective and honest as you want without the awkwardness that comes with dating someone in a close circle of yours.
- rl3 8y ago
  Oh, I agree entirely. My only qualm is that in terms of online dating, people have essentially no choice but to submit themselves to systems where the inner workings are either not known or poorly designed. Yet, it's what everyone uses, and to abstain is to drastically reduce one's exposure. The way Tinder seems to work for example, the broader an appeal you have, the higher your score. That can really suck for LGBTQ people depending on what gender they're looking for matches with. An openly bisexual male for example, will be met with a huge score penalty due to all the left swipes from women that he isn't concerned with in the first place. Most could be vastly less attractive, or in some geographies even bigoted. The women he is looking for however, have a lower chance of seeing him because of the score hit. It's perverse incentivization all around.

purplezooey 8y ago

What, dudes just give up after 60? something seems off

ldoroud 8y ago

The link seems to be broken?