Why more women live in major East Coast counties while men outnumber them in the West
Why more women live in major East Coast counties while men outnumber them in the West
There are more women than men in some of the largest urban U.S. counties east of the Mississippi River, on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Deep South.
Anyone who has suspected that there are more women than men where they live, or vice versa, will find fodder for their suspicions in new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Whether it refutes or confirms their suspicions likely depends on where they live.
Women outnumber men in the largest urban counties east of the Mississippi River, along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Deep South, while the West skews male, according to data released last week from the 2022 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, the most comprehensive source of data on American life. Those numbers were also backed up by age and sex figures from the 2020 census released earlier this year.
The article is interesting, but (unless I missed something) doesn't really spend much time answering it's headline question beyond these couple of paragraphs
The ratios vary by geography, in part because of the presence of certain institutions and industries with gender imbalances. In the most populous counties in the West, this is especially discernible. San Diego, for instance, has several male-dominated military bases, which is reflected in the sex ratio. In Austin, San Francisco, Seattle and San Jose there are plentiful jobs in tech, a sector where men account for around three-quarters of the workforce.
This is in contrast to areas with large numbers of colleges or universities, which typically have more women, according to a Census Bureau report from May.
Adding to the imbalance are the effects of historic racism in the U.S., including high rates of incarceration and the mortality gap, which have lowered the number of men in some communities, said Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.
15Yeah, I was hoping for more substantial explanation of the issue too. Disappointing.
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Colorado Springs has five military bases which likely leads to the extremely high male to female ratio.
13I mean base housing wives tho
-2Unfortunately they don’t come with the contract
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The Mississippi River seems like an odd choice for the dividing line of East vs West. By what other metric would you consider Saint Louis in the Western half of the country?
-4Population wise, the Mississippi River is the dividing line. West of the Mississippi the population densely drops very quickly outside of major cities. East of the Mississippi River the population densely is very high, even well beyond major cities.
15Had to look it up, and of course there's a Wikipedia page. I guess the population centroid has been just west of the Mississippi River in Missouri circa 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_center_of_the_United_States_population
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