WellUrban

Personal reflections on urbanism, urban life and sustainable urban design in Wellington, New Zealand.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Where the boys are


Today's Dominion Post has an article about New Zealand's shortage of men in their 30s. It's not a vast difference (if you look at the actual stats, for every 100 men in the 30-34 age group, there are 9 extra women), but that didn't stop them milking the story for all it's worth.

However, it struck a chord with my female colleagues, so I decided to dig a little further. Things are a little different if you're only interested in single people (and being ethical people, we are), with just over 3 extra single women in that age group. That led to the question: so, where are all the single men? A little Table Builder, a bit of Excel tweaking and a lot of MapInfo, and I had a map of gender imabalance in the 20-40 age group from the 2001 census. Nationwide, the pattern was fairly predictable: they're in the country (all those lonely farmers). But let's zoom into Wellington:


Pink for girls, blue for boys. The legend shows proportional gender imbalance, so light pink (0.1 to 0.2) indicates 10-20% more single women than single men. There are a few outliers, but one intriguing pattern is that there are more single men in Lambton & Te Aro (all those inner-city bachelor pads?) and more single women in the inner suburban ring. Maybe I shouldn't complain so much about the bridge and tunnel crowd.

Now, if only we had the statistics broken down, not by area unit, but by bar...

2 Comments:

At 1:25 pm, July 28, 2005, Blogger Hadyn said...

After sending this post to a single female friend of mine I recieved the following reply:

"They should do a further breakdown by height and car. That would be some
very significant analysis"

 
At 10:39 am, July 29, 2005, Blogger Tom said...

Other suggestions that I've heard include income and head-hair-to-back-hair ratio. And they call us shallow!

 

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