HOW GENDER RATIOS AFFECT YOUR DATING EXPERIENCE

If you’ve repressed your memories of your college stats course, it might be time to dust off your left-brained thinking when considering how gender ratios affect your dating experience.

Success in dating is impacted by many factors, some of which are within your control: how willing you are to date outside your type; how open you are to being vulnerable with a new person; and how you filter potential matches from online dating. 

But there are also some factors outside of your control that impact your dating experience, and one of them is gender ratios (specifically if you’re a straight man or woman). Gender ratio is the difference between how many more men than women are single, and depending on how large the difference is (ie, 100 men for 120 women), it can have a significant impact on your future plans for marriage and family. 

Why Should I Care About Gender Ratios?

Gender ratios impact dating based on one word: competition. If you’re a single, straight woman in Manhattan, you’re part of a larger group of women who’s also looking for single, straight men to pair up with. And if there’s 5 women for 1 man in your area, it means you’ll be competing against more women for the same man, while men are incentivized to play the field and date as many women as they like because the men are statistically outnumbered. 

This issue becomes even more complicated when considering other populations of singles, like gay men, who may be counted within the overall “male population” according to Census numbers, but are still not a dating option for straight women. 

Gender ratios point to who has control over the dating landscape. If there’s fewer men and more women, men don’t need to compete with each other: they have their pick of the litter. Similarly, in places like Silicon Valley where there’s more men and fewer women, women get to be picky and shape the dating landscape according to their preferences.

What Happens When There’s More Women Than Men In My City?

Gender ratios determine what group has control over the dating landscape. If there’s fewer men and more women, men don’t need to compete with each other because they have so many options to choose from, and are less pressured to find “the one.” Similarly, in places like Silicon Valley where there’s more men and fewer women, women have the advantage of being picky and shaping the dating landscape according to their preferences.

For students living in college towns, lopsided gender ratios have been found to be a huge factor in hook-up culture. In his book Dateonomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, Jon Birger examines how gender ratios affect heterosexual dating patterns amongst college-educated men and women across the U.S. Given an abundance of unattached young women on college campuses, men will shape to their advantage the form that relationships between men and women take. With a surplus of women, sexual freedoms are more advantageous to men than to women. Birger finds that college hookup culture is rooted in a statistical oversupply of women. 

However, the situation changes on campuses like the California Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech, where there’s more men than women. Birger reports that on those campuses, monogamy is more common and couples tend to have longer relationships than on campuses like NYU, where there’s more women for each male student.  

What’s The Science Behind How Gender Ratios Impact Dating (ie, Finding a Mate?)

Gender ratios affect animals in nature as much as humans. Research has shown that when there’s more males than females, the males are more likely to remain faithful to females: there are fewer opportunities for males to play the field and it benefits them to stick with one mate. A 2005 zoological study of fish mating habits found that “males increasingly deserted their mates and the young in their care as the opportunity to re-mate increased in their environment.”

In Dateonomics, Birger notes other such studies in his book that have a similar conclusion: in nature, when females are plentiful, natural selection favors those males that mate with more than one female (47). Overall, scientists agree that male behavior is more influenced by changes in sex ratios than female behavior.

What Complicates The Gender Ratio Discussion?

The big caveat with Birger’s research is he’s only looking at people with college degrees, which becomes a very salient issue in the dating world. As more and more women graduate college in record numbers, fewer and fewer men are doing the same. So when straight women list “college education” as a dating requirement, they may be limiting their dating options in an already tight dating market simply because fewer men, in general, have college degrees. 

If women in bigger cities are willing to date men without college degrees, their options for finding men would increase. But for many women who view education as a significant part of their lives and career stability, dating men without a college degree is not an ideal choice. 

What Are Gender Ratios in Chicago? 

Again, if we’re using Jon Birger’s perspective and only considering the college-educated population of straight singles, Chicago presents lopsided gender ratios that benefit men. 

According to DataUS, in 2022, 20,520 men were awarded degrees from institutions in Chicago, IL, which is 0.65 times less than the 31,580 female students who received degrees in the same year. Along this vein, college-educated women in Chicago are also outperforming men in the workforce. In a report detailing the Chicago post-pandemic labor market, The Chicago Fed finds a sharp rise in female labor force participation (including women with children) in contrast with the labor force participation rate among men ages 25 and 54, which is still below pre-pandemic levels.

What Should I Do If My City Has Lopsided Gender Ratios?

First, Birger recommends that young people research the gender ratios at their preferred colleges to determine how those numbers may impact their college dating experience. 

For women who have already graduated college and live in a city with gender ratios that favor men, it may be a good idea to consider dating outside your city. In the year 2025, it is possible to date long-distance if you find the right person. Similarly, if the college degree requirement is leading to a dearth of dating options, you may want to consider blue collar men, who can have great, stable jobs and be a good intellectual match (even if they didn’t go to college).