I am hardly an expert on the demographics of all European countries, but there are some observations and an explanation that is possibly generally valid. Note how East Germany suffers a deficit of women almost everywhere, with one exception: Berlin. The North of Sweden, a cold and dark place, is likewise missing women. Further, in England we see a situation not quite unlike Eastern Germany: women flock to the prosperous South East.
At birth, sex ratios are approximately even. Thus, any distortions are normally due to people moving. The main reason for there being more women than men is, by the way, due to women living longer and men killing themselves in whatever way. This includes higher suicide rates, but also deaths due to not being able to handle testosterone, i.e. dangerous behavior.
From what I know about sociology and demographics, there seems to be a tendency for young women, whether educated or not, to move to more prosperous regions. This may partly be due to young women, even uneducated ones, having many more options than uneducated young men. There is an abundance of au pair positions, and then there are business sectors like hospitality or gastronomy, which gladly employ young women. Many Janes know this, so they pack their bags and move to a more prosperous region, instead of settling for unemployed Tom.
Of course there is also mobility among men, but this seems much more restricted to the skilled and educated crowd. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have a university degree. Having learnt a trade also opens many doors. However, when I look at the data, I can't help but get the impression that this shows that immobile men are not lazy and stupid but simply don't have the same options society grants to women.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
(Also, if you’ve got a comment that is off-topic or only tangentially related to this article, then please post in the most recent Open Thread. Thank you.)
Oi, mate, there's a mistake in that map...
ReplyDeleteTurkey and their kebabs aren't part of Europe :^)
Hello /pol/!
DeleteGeographically and culturally, Turkey is not part of Europe. However, our EU overlords perceive this issue differently.
DeleteIsraeli military historian Martin van Crefeld elaborated on this issue (among many others) in his book "The Privileged Sex".
ReplyDeleteHe exemplified this female dynamic (among other examples) by scrutinizing the Californian gold rush during the 19th century, where female prostitutes only followed the gold-digging trecks inasmuch as those miners had established little settlements or towns with a higher than minimum level of comfort, security and control. Even with their Johns guarding them the whores would no go further into the wild up to the most prosperous mining locations, where they could have earned even more money by servicing those gold laden diggers nonetheless. Thus the more prosperous regions were considered to be those areas, where their supreme power of female sexual choice and control wouldn't have been violated.
I did not know about that. When I looked at that chart the first time, my immediate reaction was that this seems to contradict mainstream narrative, i.e. that women are more ambitious and stupid men of course stay put. Considering your remark, the reality is quite easy to summarize: men take risks when they can no longer prosper where they are and still have the means to go somewhere else in order to try their luck, and those guys are also more inclined to take economic risks, based on pure necessity. On the other hand, women tend to only follow, and prefer comfort over risk taking. There might be a deeper truth in this observation, and a most important one for our times as well: don't go where women already are a majority, since there is less potential for growth.
DeleteOn a somewhat related note, I once spoke to an economist who elaborated to me that there is very clear evidence that once a profession is feminized, wages go down. He claimed that medicine and dentistry in Germany were good examples, considering that those professions were once highly lucrative, while they currently are merely among the better paid professions. Apparently many of those men who would have flocked to medicine years ago nowadays pursue other fields.
It's worse than I thought: in 2006, already about 2/3 of medical students were female:
Deletehttp://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/59406
[German: "Immer weniger Männer wollen Ärzte werden. Prestige wie Gehälter sind dramatisch gesunken. Frauen springen in die Lücke."]
The question, though, is whether diminished prestige was cause or consequence.
(To spare the non-Germans Google Translate: The quotation says that fewer and fewer men want to become doctors, prestige as well as remuneration are much diminished, and that women 'jump in', which has the undertone that women don't fully replace men. This is later on corroborated in the article, where it is stated that one needs to hire three female doctors to replace two males ones, since they rather have a good work/life balance than dedicate themselves fully to their job.)
DeleteYes, I heard about the trend of professions that become infiltrated by women, become less paid and less prestigious. Take the legal profession too...more women entering that...and to your point, cause vs correlation vs coincidence and whether their entry has caused decreased pay.
DeleteThen again, nobody likes lawyers to begin with!
To your other point about women wanting good work/life balance...for sure, that's one reason you don't see them wanting to become big-shot CEOs or launching Silicon Valley startups...
They certainly want to be CEOs, they just don't want to make the necessary sacrifices. Marissa Meyer is a good example. She was made Yahoo CEO, seemingly in a push to make that ailing company look progressive, and the first thing she did was taking time off for having a child. She then followed this up by blowing about $10bn on absolutely pointless acquisitions. These days, Yahoo itself is worth basically nothing. Almost all the value lies in their shares of Alibaba.
DeleteMarissa Mayer is a total me$$! Hey, but the media still liked her, cuz she fits the blond poster girl mold and immediately installed a child's room right next to her office, so everything must have been fine & dandy.
Delete@ "Heard that one":
"Then again, nobody likes lawyers to begin with!" => true as well ;)
The book "Marissa Mayer and the fight to save yahoo" is pretty juicy. It goes into how she was hired and what decisions she made up to the date of the book's publication. Sleazy, you are bang-on, most of Yahoo's value is based on Alibaba.
DeleteTo Marissa Mayer's credit, I doubt any one coming in could save Yahoo. Although I get the impression she is bringing in Google tactics and such into Yahoo. So she wasn't really creative and just tried to transplant one company's Googl-iness to Yahoo.
At least Marissa Mayer dismissed any allegiance to feminism when those hacks used her as their "women in tech" goddess.
Although now that she's coming under fire, it won't be long before she pulls a Hilary Clinton-style "oh, I'm a woman" that's why excuse. E.g. "I am targeted because I'm a blonde photogenic woman".
Sounds similar to that Elizabeth Holmes who was the wunder-darling in the startup world with her company that miraculously found a way to test for blood much easier than the big boy companys...
Until it was exposed the company was a sham.
Of course, now the wunderkid is blaming sexism for the attention: http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/elizabeth-holmes-sexism-theranos/
Aaron, could you elaborate on you remark "don't go where women already are a majority, since there is less potential for growth.". I didn't quite get it. You are not refering to competition for jobs, right? Since you pointed out that woman tend to choose professions which men do not necessarily favor.
DeleteGL
In short, the reasoning is that women are, in general, more risk averse than men. However, with risk comes greater variance of outcome. For instance, this means that if you go into field X, you may end up making it really big with a non-zero probability. Thus, once women enter a field in large numbers, you have an indication that the variance of outcome has been greatly reduced, possibly due to market forces, or due to political pressure. Further, potential for growth is often due to one's ability to make sacrifices, i.e. longer hours or less attractive locations lead to more money, more responsibility, and more (economic) success. Women are known to favor work/life balance, so if a field is shifting towards a female majority, you can rest assured that your chances, as male, to put in a lot of hours to get ahead are greatly diminished.
DeleteSo, what would be the take home message in the end for guys living in red/orange areas?
Delete1. Stay where you are since there you have higher chance to prosper career-wise? I'm still not sure about since these areas often conincide with a tough economic situation and fewer well-paid job opportunities also for high-profile jobs e.g. in science or engineering.
2. However, if you want easier access and more choice regarding woman you should move to another region?
GL
Beyond the lack of women in east Germany and the surplus in France, what come out of this map is that women are more concentrated in cities.
ReplyDeleteOne aspect which highly weighs in favour of East German women is that they are sexually much more open & expressive right from the start and much better in the sack. But that's just my personal 5 ct.
DeleteCompared to them the average West German female is an uptight, marterialistic nuisance (on average, that is).
That has been my experience as well.
DeleteThink actual socialism (DDR, not social-democracy) had some influence ?
DeleteIt cannot be just a coincidence.
Fun thing, look at the netherlands. Two regions are dark. The north. (An area where land is cheap, and nobody under 40 wants to live :) ). And Rotterdam. Our port city, and while I don't live there, I do know some things about it. First, strangely enough, the people there are the happiest according to recent reports. Secondly, it is a port city, so it attracts people who work in ports. Esp the less mobile normally. It also has a huge immigrant population, which according to a lot of people are pretty anti 'white' people. Last, you don't go out at night as a woman unescorted in rotterdam.
ReplyDeleteMake of that what you will.
Wow, this graph is really revealing. Since I grew up in one of those ultra-red areas in East Germany I can totally confirm this observation. A decade ago in my teenager years when I went to bigger parties in the area regularly it was almost always a "sausage fest". So I knew that the situation was bad, but I didn’t expected it to be that bad compared to the rest of Europe.
ReplyDeleteThough it got moderately better when I moved to one of the bigger cities in East Germany to study (still orange).
Not only was the ratio far better, but there were also a lot more "open" girls. What I want to say is that the male-female ratio has probably also some major implications on how men and women "get along" together in societies. There are indeed some interesting findings regarding this issue for instance in 1983s book of Guttentag & Secord "Too many women? The sex role question." One of the major claims there is, that in an environment with an excess of males the dynamics shift towards woman beeing more picky and stand-offish in general. Maybe one of the reasons that in some countries young frustrated men fall easily for the advice of "Mystery et al." ;)
Keep in mind that even when the sex ratios are approximately even, there will not be a woman for every guy. Well, technically there will be, but the issue is that men prefer young women, so you have guys aged 16 to 45 chasing after women who belong to a relatively narrow age range. Attractive, established guys in their 30s can easily complete with guys in their mid-20s who have yet to find their place in live, and those, in turn, may experience a mostly sexless decade of their life if they are not able to distinguish themselves from their peers.
DeleteOn the other hand I do remember reading an article some ten years ago in the German edition of Playboy magazine about the East German university town of JENA, which at that time (or even still today?) "suffered" from an abysmally low rate of young(er) men and a surplus of frustrated female students (studying some bullshit subject or training to become teachers). Said females were highly frustrated with their situation, because they were stuck with a very low number of eligible & sexually attractive "alphas" within city limits. With larger cities like Berlin or Leipzig being too far away for a quick ride, out of frustration many Jena student girls were reported to actively & openly pursue even local men whom they'd usually have neglected, just to get a ONS, their female ego stroked or a few montgs or weeks of a lukewarm "relationship" with some schmuck majoring in engineering — anything just to not remain (or appear) left behind.
DeleteThe men addressed were (apart from a small, very indulgent minority ;) overall reported to be petrified by this outburst of female sexual aggressiveness. They were said to rather spend the weekend over in Berlin at mainstream clubs, getting drunk and redjected by snobby Berlin broads left and right, than having to face their willing local female student peers. ;)
Comedie humaine, anyone?
I visited Jena a little over ten years ago. It struck me as a nice little city, with lots of green. I further recall it as being very homogeneous --- note that at that time I was living in Berlin-Kreuzberg, so my perception might have been off. I further recall women to have been unusually 'friendly', compared to Berlin, which could well have been a consequence of said imbalance.
DeleteLarge gender imbalances cause pretty messed up behaviour. China is not exactly a great place for young men now. I grew up in a resource town where there was a 2:1 male female ratio. Women of below average appearance had a lot of options. Recently, I ended up running into a woman from my hometown who regaled me with tales on how while living there she had three separate guys as her "buds" to act as her primary social circle (I think the term is beta orbiter), and she was, at best, average looking. I got the impression she did not screw around with any of them, and they were all desperately sucking up to her in hopes of winning the "prize" such as it was.
ReplyDeleteAre you chinese ? I mean are you born in China and lived there ?
DeleteNope, not Chinese and never lived there. The gender imbalance due to the one child policy is pretty well known though.
DeleteYou cannot tell without experience.
DeleteI'm european and I had 2 chinese girlfriends (born in China). So I had a glimpse of chinese culture. For both I was their first white guys, they didn't seem to hate on chinese guy (they both had chinese boyfriends before me), they were not entitled bitches, they were traditionial, very feminine, etc.
Most people in China are married by the age 25. Single girls after 25 feel ashamed. Low divorce rate. First things people ask when a girl has a boyfriend is "when do you get married ?". Chinese girls cook for their man.
Of course, I'm not claiming I know everything but there was no "man-hating" culture. Of course a lot of girls abuse guys. And of course gender imbalance is a problem nonetheless. But it didn't seem to have the effect we would imagine on relationships between the sexes.
Well, I'm the guy with the 2 chinese gfs. I had a month of intensive interactions with chinese girls and I completely changed my mind. Seems like you were right, OP.
DeleteChinese girls are really full of themselves, very rude, think they have privileges, they think everything should be handed to them on a silver plate, a lot of them are very (socially) awkward too. Chinese guys are fucking pussies. Chinese people are almost worse than western people. Do you know that in China girls control the finance of the house ? The guy has to hand the woman all his salary and she choses what to do with the money !!
My statement that you cannot judge without experience is still valid tho. I changed my mind because of my experience. Seems like I was extremely lucky with my 2 chinese gfs.
Check out this humoristic video about chinese couples vs western couples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nk3wBuvM-U
The money part starts at 4:20. (Of course, they idealize western couples. They don't realize that actually there is no difference.)
Somewhat jives with my impression of things over here in North America. If I had to bet, I'd say that there are 4 things skew gender ratios women-heavy.
ReplyDelete1) Cities in general
2) Universities
3) Government jobs
4) Nice weather
Places like Fort McMurray (when oil was booming) were probably horrid sausage-fests. Remote northern Alberta plus high paying essentially construction work means terrible sexual prospects.
Even without the oil boom, I do not think people ever went to Fort Mac to meet women. You move there for the work, and hopefully on your time off meet someone somewhere else......
DeleteThere's an opposite state of affairs in New Zealand. 91 men for every 100 woman between 25-49. This article doesn't go into the reasons for the number discrepancy, but looks at the imbalance in education.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11442338
I haven't lived in Australia for a decade, but the perception in the media at the time was that more men from NZ choose to move to Australia than women.