Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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It's funny... here in New York City, I hear people saying the exact opposite. That guys are having a great time on a dating site, because there are tons of attractive and interesting women, and all the single girls seem to create profiles! And girls not having a lot of luck on a dating site, because a lot of guys don't create profiles, and sometimes it seems like all the "good" ones are taken.

However, this may also be a function of age -- I'm in my early thirties, as are my friends. And of course, New York City.

I do think you're right about "online dating works well for people who are already likely to be successful at dating" -- in my experience, whether it's online or offline is irrelevant. Online dating isn't any fundamentally different at all -- people are attracted to each other, or not. Online dating just vastly widens the pool of potential people you might meet. You might see 100 people in a bar one night, and 90% are immediately out of your age/gender range, leaving just 10. You could easily browse through 200 filtered candidates on a dating site in an evening.

Guys, seriously, spend a few years on the East coast. The girls are nice, down to earth, educated, and plentiful. And the winters will make you tough.

I dunno, man. I just wish they all could be Calfornia girls.

They are! Where do you think the smart California girls go to school? In Boston.

You bringing up things being different in New York City made me remember that if you compare the proportion of women and men of New York City and Los Angeles, you will notice that there are more women than men in New York and the opposite in Los Angeles. Now this fact alone may not be enough to conclude that based on these ratios that it is the cause of such a change in quality of women. But from another perspective it makes sense. In Los Angeles and in California, there are less women. This means that women have a much larger pool of men that they can choose, so they can afford to be picky. This means that the proportion of good looking, successful men using online dating increases since there aren't enough women in the local area to date. Now New York on the other hand, the advantage is for men as there are more women and they can be picky. This means that even attractive and interesting women now have to make themselves publicly available via online dating.

Of course this is just a hypothesis so of course this may not be the case.

Yeah, New York City has got to be the best place I've ever been single (and that includes Sydney, Oz). The women are pretty great here. As for the OKC thing, the general attitude is that it's good to ration your usage because it's _too easy_ to fill your schedule with online dates and not meet women offline.

Try Singapore, too.

That's just an extension of the "big city" effect. In general, attractive women gravitate toward big cities seeking successful men. I know that sounds sexist, but it really is a thing and it skews demographics. There are more dating women in NYC competing for fewer men. The situation in Nome, Alaska is reversed.

It sounds like a sexist comment because it is.

The reality is that in a place like New York educated women move to the city for their careers. So do men, however when men get married and have children they tend to continue to work, whereas it's more common for women to leave the workforce. Hence, the percentage of the men in the city that go home to their family in Connecticut (or Westchester, or whatever) is much higher than the percentage of women that do so. Far more of the men in the city are ineligible. Couple that with higher university graduation rates among women and the trend will only continue.

I've _never_ seen behaviour that would indicate that women move [to New York] in order to find successful men. Oy.

I'm not sure I understand your logic. Let's say 100 men and 100 women move to the Big Apple for their careers. Now let's say 50 of the men and 50 of the women hook up, get married, and move to Scarsdale. Let's say all of the women who have moved to Scarsdale buy a minivan and give up their jobs. Now, during the day, we have 100 men in the city and 50 women, giving a 2:1 ratio of men to women, but there are still 50 single men and 50 single women, giving a 1:1 ratio of single men to single women. And at night there are 50 men, all of whom are single, and 50 women, all of whom are single. Again, a 1:1 ratio.

So where does the demographic skew come from in your model?

Personally, I'm not so convinced that women move to the Big Apple merely search of successful men, though. There's all sorts of stuff going on in NYC that would appeal to women!

Ignoring the heteronormativity here, there are far more single women on the east coast (especially NYC) than men. It's the opposite on the west coast.

You're forgetting the job vacancies that are filled when the married women leave the workforce.

And these job vacancies are gender-specific? If the 50 job vacancies must then be filled by 50 single women, then yes we now have a lot more single women in the Big Apple. If they can be filled by 25 single women and 25 single men, then the single men:women ratio is still 1:1.

I guess I might buy the argument that the vacant jobs might go to 30 women and 20 men, which would back up your point.

Yeah, I probably should have expanded. Those jobs are often in fashion, journalism, and other fields that have a higher female to male ratio.

I see it as a sexist comment if you're incredibly sensitive to any claim that men or women might have trivial motivations. It's unfortunate, but stereotypes don't just come into existence with precedent.

No, it's sexist if it's presuming that more women than men have trivial motivations or that those have more influence among women than men. Particularly when there are other, far less condescending and far more likely reasons for the gender skew in NYC.

I think you're right that this is not the reason for the gender skew, but I feel obligated to point out that the men might just take different actions in response to the trivial motivations.

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