
Online Dating in the Bay Area, Gender Ratios by City and Age – Match.com - swimfar
https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comDatingbyCityandAge/Relocation
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tempo987654321
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.

~~~
cabaalis
I don't quite follow the math. Why would only 1 person exit the pool in the
one case and 2 in the other?

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dmonitor
In the gay case, both people who left the dating pool are potential mates. In
the straight case, only one potential mate left.

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gertlex
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...](https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comBayAreaDating/Dashboard1)

(And to compare, with where the current link is taking me:
[https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome...](https://public.tableau.com/profile/eddie.hernandez#!/vizhome/Match_comDatingbyCityandAge/Relocation))

Looks like the term Man Jose is valid to some degree within these data.

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swimfar
Yeah, I should have verified the link. Thanks.

Original source:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dati...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/9mqx2l/online_dating_in_the_bay_area_gender_ratios_by/)

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lettergram
On mobile it's basically unviewable.

Gotta say, I wasn't expecting Boulder to have a worse ratio

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makewavesnotwar
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.

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rl3
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.

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tuesdayrain
> 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
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.

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krschultz
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.

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jurassic
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-
pop...](http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-population/)

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
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
"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.

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

~~~
ravenstine
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.

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

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drewmate
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?

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dnautics
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.

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

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romed
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.

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sjg007
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).

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

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ldoroud
The link seems to be broken?

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

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

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asdfasgasdgasdg
> 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!

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BadassFractal
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.

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jsharf
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

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ben_jones
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".

~~~
BadassFractal
Few things make people as uncomfortable as telling them "hey, maybe your
victim mentality isn't helping you and you actually do have a shot at this,
you just need to work harder than others". Life's not fair, I guess? If you
don't want it that bad, then plenty of other, much more motivated men, will
work for it.

It's a little like entrepreneurship and complaining that your parents aren't
millionaires and can't seed fund your first venture, so why even bother.

~~~
tuesdayrain
Reading that genuinely made me feel uncomfortable but I'm glad you wrote it, I
think I needed to hear that. Something about imagining all the other men who
are much more motivated than me really gives me a deep desire to prove myself.

