Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> The US 2010 census was pretty close to 50/50

Well, China is as well (according to information above). 34 million is 2.5% of 1.34 billion (Chinese population in 2010), so China is at 47.5/52.5.

View on HN

That's pretty far from 50-50, man. It means one out of every ten men won't have a partner if you naively paired them up.

Maybe they should let gay relationships on TV...

If that 34 million figure is correct, it would be 2.5%, not 10% ("one out of every ten").

The "one out of every ten" figure is basically correct given the division stated in tomp's comment.

Assume the population is 47.5% female / 52.5% male.

Then, for every 525 men, there are 475 women.

This means out of every 525 men, (525-475) = 50 of them can't mate, which is 9.5%.

However, tomp is wrong that 2.5% of the population being surplus men implies that the population share is 47.5-52.5 (this split means 5% of the population are surplus men, not 2.5%). It actually implies 48.75-51.25, which means about 4.9% of men have no female counterpart in the population.

And this is intuitively correct; if 2.5% of the whole population can't find a partner, and all of those people are men, and the numbers of men and women are approximately equal, it should be the case that about 5% of men can't find a partner.

I come up with 4.9%. 1.35 billion in China, and assuming 34 million more men than women, that gives 692 million men and 658 million women. 34 million of those 692 million men do not have a corresponding woman. 34/692 = 0.04913294797688.

Oh, you're right, I divided by the entire population instead of the the male population only.

sure, but you'd have to look at the age / demographics too wouldn't you?

it might be 2.5% of the total population but women live longer on average than men so what happens if you look between the ages of say 20 to 30?

Stepping out to a clearer source, Wikipedia[1] summarizes data from the World Bank and the CIA. I think the numbers that best reflect current China suggest a 12% (CIA at birth), 17% (CIA 15 or younger) or 19% (WB at birth) disparity depending on the estimate. Choose any of those and you've got a pretty huge disparity. I think that the article may have been looking only at a cohort, not the entire population, so taking the ratio of the quoted number of missing men against the entire Chinese population may be misleading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio

People don't usually marry for wildly different ages, so what about age brackets?

34m of the total population is 2.5%, but what is 34m as a percentage of the population between, say, 15yrs and 30yrs?

That's not that close. I have heard the imbalance is causing real problems. I mean, that is a 5 point difference and ...geez ...(breaks out calculator cuz I'm old) about a 9% difference. And probably worse in certain age groups. If 10% to 20% of men have no hope of getting married purely based on a lack of women, not counting women making other choices or being gay or whatever, that's going to have significant social consequences.

By way of comparison, NYC is 53/47 in favor of females, and it is famously difficult for women to find men in NYC. That ratio is way more off-balance than you might think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com