
Why men on earth outnumber women by 60M - davidf18
http://qz.com/335183/heres-why-men-on-earth-outnumber-women-by-60-million/
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kazinator
Relevant: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a-pregnant-
woma...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a-pregnant-womans-chan/)

The probability of conception producing a male child is not 0.5; it is stacked
in favor of the male. (In "most industrialized countries").

~~~
davidbauer
That's true. However, women have a longer average life expectancy in every
country in the world, which should (over-)compensate the slight imbalance
towards male at birth. Which in fact it does in industrialized countries.

~~~
hajile
The more interesting fact is when you break down the numbers by age group. By
the mid to late twenties, the gender ratio is very close to even. Why do so
many men die so early?

We know that parents tend to ignore male children much more. We know male
suicide rates are several times those of females. We know that 92% of
workplace fatalities are men. We know males are the vast majority of victims
of violent crime. We know that most deaths in war are men (consider ISIS
taking females captive while killing the males).

What we do not know is why the world is okay building itself on the bodies of
men.

Speaking of retirement though, is interesting that despite women living longer
than men, a huge number of countries force men to work five more years than
women in order to retire.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age#Retirement_age_b...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age#Retirement_age_by_country)

~~~
nazgob
This is quite fascinating issue. There is also cultural aspect. For instance
in China, one child policy created imbalance of genders. Parents prefer their
single child to be a boy and with cheap USG they could pick and choose.

Retirement time is also interesting. In Poland we used to have 65 years for
men and 60 for women. Now its 67 for both (still in transition period so its
increasing slowly to finally settle at 67).

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na85
Contemplating the outcome of 60M+ single men (discounting homosexuals which
estimates put at around 5-20% of the population) unable to find a woman simply
because of the numbers game seems coupled with the "Little Emperor" phenomenon
that was discussed here on HN recently is pretty concerning.

In countries with high rates of sex-selective abortions, I fear violent crime
rates, particularly sex crime, will skyrocket.

~~~
ffn
Surprisingly enough, China still has a huge number of (as they put it) "left-
over" women. This is likely because the population of there is well aware of
the 60M+ fact going in their favor and, in truly amazing display of classical
economics, heightened the standards and criterion the average girl uses to
look for a man. The result (aside from the large majority who are one-to-one
dating/engaged/married like it's always been) is that there are a ton of
frustrated young men who (unless a miracle occurs) will remaining single until
he dies, a small population of ultra-successful men who concurrently juggle
multiple girlfriends (and possibly wives), and a large group girls who are
annoyed that all the "good" men are taken.

Unfortunately, sex crimes have been on the rise in China.

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kstenerud
That has got to be the most annoying website I've seen in a long time. As I
started skimming the page looking for the point where it talks about
population imbalances, I had scrolled down a few pages and was asking myself
"what the hell does this article have to do with population?" before realizing
it's just stringing a bunch of articles together in one big scroller.

Only then did I realize that it was just the top 1/3 of the beginning of the
scroller (which I skipped because it looked like a bunch of spammy noise).

~~~
lifeformed
Also it won't let me scroll with clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging
the mouse. That's how I quickly skim an article.

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jleedev
Link to the actual article: [http://data.qz.com/2014/qz-
sexmap/](http://data.qz.com/2014/qz-sexmap/)

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davidbauer
I'm the author of this piece. If you have any questions, go ahead and I'll try
to answer.

~~~
estefan
What's the actual article? I get "Teaching women to fight today could stop
rapes tomorrow". The string "60" doesn't appear anywhere...

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ikeboy
I had the same thing, then I tried in incognito and it worked. Probably
adblocker or something.

~~~
estefan
Oh yeah, it works in incognito.

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estefan
Interestingly some researchers believe that sex is determined due to hormones
(rather than genes - i.e. it's not possible to create a breed that biases one
sex more than another), and that there is a bias in animal (including human)
populations. It's not determined by a simple roll of the dice.

In some insects the female is able to select gender specifically by
fertilising the egg with sperm or withholding it.

In others, it seems that it has to do with ambient temperature, abundance of
food, etc. If there are enough resources to make a large offspring, the most
optimal one is produced that can benefit by being largest. In turtles it's a
female, in crocodiles a male is produced (IIRC).

Anyway, in humans, higher rankers typically have male offspring. Apparently
American presidents have had a disproportionately large number of sons. Poorer
families typically desire - and apparently some studies indicate produce -
more girls. This can again be explained by what is most optimal. It's more
common in human societies for males to inherit rank, whereas women can marry
into it. So poorer families in some cultures bequeath more wealth to women for
dowries so they can try to buy their way into higher classes. By contrast,
higher ranking men can father more children.

I'm basically regurgitating what I've been reading in The Red Queen. Not my
ideas - check out the book. It's very interesting.

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pluma
American presidents aren't exactly a large sample size. I seriously doubt any
statistically interesting data can be derived from such a small set.

~~~
thanatropism
Sample sizes have nothing to do with it. If you want to study the determinants
of presidency in the US it's a 1:1 sample.

I keep repeating this on news.ycombinator: statistical analysis is predicated
on the prior hypothesis that the stuff you're measuring is orthogonal to the
stuff that you can't measure.

So: what are we measuring? What are we _not_ measuring? Is our theory that
people exerting power have more testosterone and hence have more sons? That
can be tested in wider populations, and including presidents might just be a
huge confounding factors. Is it that presidents become powerful because they
have the Mystery Factor, and that, too, is behind the excess sons?

If, by construction, only presidents have the Mystery Factor, we have to start
from there. But then we need theories about the Mystery Factor to test. And
controls, men who haven't become president by a matter of chance, and so on.

On the other hand: you can have _huge_ datasets generated from website design
tests and still end up doing "A/A testing" and such cargo cult statistics,
complete with sacrifices to the gods of large sample sizes.

