Where the boys are

File under: demographics, Wellington

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...