Divergence in U.S. Sex Ratios by County, 1820–2010 | Hacker News Reader

Divergence in U.S. Sex Ratios by County, 1820–2010

lincolnmullen.com

18 pointsjhnewman18 comments

One scary sentence from the linked blog post: "Since the 1990s, the map shows isolated, lightly populated counties with heavily male populations: those are the counties with prisons."

Prisoners are included within normal population figures? Interesting.

Prisoners are people.

Prisoners live in a geographical location.

Seems kind of obvious that prisoners living within the bounds of a geographic area would be included in counts of people living in that geographic area.

They do not live there by choice and they are very isolated from the rest of the population. It is different enough I would like to see numbers with and without.

If census information is used to apportion government funds, you'd want the money to go to where they were from (which, if it has such a high number of prisoners that their population numbers are affected, probably really need the money), as opposed to going to whatever community managed to lobby to build the prison.

It's something of a controversy about whether the Census should count prisoners as living in the place where they are imprisoned or in the place where they formerly lived. The policy of counting them as living in the place where they are imprisoned diverts federal and state monies away from the places that they came from.

> The policy of counting them as living in the place where they are imprisoned diverts federal and state monies away from the places that they came from.

I think, viewed more carefully, one would be forced to recognize that the effect described results instead from the policy of allocating money for programs by total Census counts without considering the fitness of those counts to the purpose of the particular programs and making suitable adjustments (and that that policy is going to have some infelicities, if not the exact same ones, no matter what general policies are adopted for Census counts.)

The 2010 data shows Pulaski Country, Georgia to have a high women population. This is also due to prison population since there is a women's prison there.

I imagine northern Alaska is predominately male still due to the 'wild frontier hard life' aspects more than a prison in the current data, as the probably exception to this analysis.

That presumably is due to the oil extraction going on up there.

Some heavily male counties in some decades may be military bases - look for Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and Cannon AFB in Clovis, New Mexico.

Women live longer than men.

I wonder how of the divergences not explained by prisons are explained by the age of the population.

Also worth considering, is whether men are more likely to emigrate than women.

Indeed,

The graph is almost an essay in "how little raw data can tell you". Are the areas of more women from emigration, age, areas from which many men have been taken to prison, something else?

My guess: men are likely to emigrate to any place with decent jobs (e.g. some oil state), women are probably likely to emigrate to a sex-and-the-city states.

National flip from predominantly male to female happened around 1950, just after WW2.

It was a combination of WW2 and penicillin severely reducing the mortality rate of childbirth.

The broad swath of yellow across the south in 1870 is...kinda chilling.

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