Why men on earth outnumber women by 60M | Hacker News Reader

Why men on earth outnumber women by 60M

qz.com

51 pointsdavidf1836 comments

Relevant: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a-pregnant-woma...

The probability of conception producing a male child is not 0.5; it is stacked in favor of the male. (In "most industrialized countries").

The article mentions that this is balanced by the longer life spans of women leading to an overall average of very, very near 50/50 (other factors aside).

Indeed. But if we now return to this global finding, then the assumptions change. What if, globally (not just in "most industrialized countries") there is a bias toward conception producing males (because, say, it is a biological given), yet the compensating factors (longevity of women) do not hold.

That's true. However, women have a longer average life expectancy in every country in the world, which should (over-)compensate the slight imbalance towards male at birth. Which in fact it does in industrialized countries.

And it isn't a coincidence, as you point out in the article, Fisher's math predicts this.

The more interesting fact is when you break down the numbers by age group. By the mid to late twenties, the gender ratio is very close to even. Why do so many men die so early?

We know that parents tend to ignore male children much more. We know male suicide rates are several times those of females. We know that 92% of workplace fatalities are men. We know males are the vast majority of victims of violent crime. We know that most deaths in war are men (consider ISIS taking females captive while killing the males).

What we do not know is why the world is okay building itself on the bodies of men.

Speaking of retirement though, is interesting that despite women living longer than men, a huge number of countries force men to work five more years than women in order to retire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age#Retirement_age_b...

This is quite fascinating issue. There is also cultural aspect. For instance in China, one child policy created imbalance of genders. Parents prefer their single child to be a boy and with cheap USG they could pick and choose.

Retirement time is also interesting. In Poland we used to have 65 years for men and 60 for women. Now its 67 for both (still in transition period so its increasing slowly to finally settle at 67).

Contemplating the outcome of 60M+ single men (discounting homosexuals which estimates put at around 5-20% of the population) unable to find a woman simply because of the numbers game seems coupled with the "Little Emperor" phenomenon that was discussed here on HN recently is pretty concerning.

In countries with high rates of sex-selective abortions, I fear violent crime rates, particularly sex crime, will skyrocket.

Female infanticide rates (which account for the population imbalance) are correlated with security in terms of warfare and standard of living. Fix those, and the populations will move closer to parity. It's been that way for as long as humans have.

With birth control and condoms, there are only cultural barriers to new social norms regarding females with multiple partners. Such behavior is certainly within the range of commonly observed human sexual behavior. Legalized and effectively regulated prostitution would be one way of addressing such a demographic issue while avoiding crime and human trafficking. Legalization would probably be one of the easiest changes to implement. (Given the vehement opposition to such an idea in the US, that's saying something.)

Surprisingly enough, China still has a huge number of (as they put it) "left-over" women. This is likely because the population of there is well aware of the 60M+ fact going in their favor and, in truly amazing display of classical economics, heightened the standards and criterion the average girl uses to look for a man. The result (aside from the large majority who are one-to-one dating/engaged/married like it's always been) is that there are a ton of frustrated young men who (unless a miracle occurs) will remaining single until he dies, a small population of ultra-successful men who concurrently juggle multiple girlfriends (and possibly wives), and a large group girls who are annoyed that all the "good" men are taken.

Unfortunately, sex crimes have been on the rise in China.

Homosexual population is more like 1-5%. Distinct category from "anyone who has had a homosexual experience or thought" where the larger numbers usually come from. Latter would not be useful here.

That has got to be the most annoying website I've seen in a long time. As I started skimming the page looking for the point where it talks about population imbalances, I had scrolled down a few pages and was asking myself "what the hell does this article have to do with population?" before realizing it's just stringing a bunch of articles together in one big scroller.

Only then did I realize that it was just the top 1/3 of the beginning of the scroller (which I skipped because it looked like a bunch of spammy noise).

Also it won't let me scroll with clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging the mouse. That's how I quickly skim an article.

Thank you! I thought, "Either I'm getting old, or this is the worst site I've seen since 99.".

Then, I clicked the author's name (at the top) and the page went blank, except for the header.

Logged into HN just to agree with you guys on how terribly that site is designed. I think the big issue is how if you keep scrolling it just pops another article into the feed so you can never stop scrolling. So there is no way to easily find the end of an article.

Link to the actual article: http://data.qz.com/2014/qz-sexmap/

I'm the author of this piece. If you have any questions, go ahead and I'll try to answer.

What's the actual article? I get "Teaching women to fight today could stop rapes tomorrow". The string "60" doesn't appear anywhere...

I had the same thing, then I tried in incognito and it worked. Probably adblocker or something.

Oh yeah, it works in incognito.

Might be an issue with infinite scrolling on the Quartz site, works fine on my machine. Try this if the above link doesn't work for you: http://data.qz.com/2014/qz-sexmap/

I think the sites dependent on flash or something. I thought it was just a bad headline until I saw some commenters mentioning article details, so I tried multiple browsers until one worked.

I've seen three different articles at that link so far. The latest is "Apple is setting itself up for a giant iPad." Is QZ just broken?

EDIT: Now it's showing "Picasso = Genius". At the top the embedded link says "http://qz.com/335183 ", which matches the URL, but at the bottom it says "http://qz.com/425662 ". Very confusing.

The downvotes in this thread are hilarious, it's like downvoting as a proxy for "Works for Me."

Try this if the original link doesn't work for you: http://data.qz.com/2014/qz-sexmap/

Is there a place where we can actually read the article? That site is very broken in my browser. I cannot scroll past the first few lines - the articles don't scroll independently.

Edit: seems to be fixed now.

I found this sentence confusing or misleading,

> In 1961, the earliest year the World Bank provides data for, the world was within 0.09 percentage points of a perfectly equal distribution. Ever since, the gap has widened; now men outnumber women on the planet by almost 60 million.

It jumps from a percentage to an absolute number. What was the absolute number before? What is the percentage after?

The reason I chose to mix the two was that comparing absolute numbers wouldn't be accurate since it would be distorted by overall population growth. That leaves you with comparing the percentages. In 2013, women accounted for 49.59% of all people, so that's .41 off a perfectly equal distribution. Yet .41 percentage points doesn't really give a good impression of what that actually means, while 60 million is a number readers can relate to more easily.

Whenever I see an article swap units mid-sentence it automatically makes me think they are doing it to bolster their argument because if they kept the same units, it wouldn't actually show what they wanted it to.

Yep, that's often true. Still think it's fair in this case, for the reasons explained above. 60 million are A LOT of people.

It's an unnecessary blemish on an otherwise excellent article, imo. Could instead mention percentages before and after, then stress the absolute number to get across the 60M figure.

Ok, point taken.

I'm not ripping on you at all, it's an interesting article. Just wanted to provide some feedback. I'm a scientist by training and was taught early on the tricks that many papers use to make something seem big when it really isn't.

Interestingly some researchers believe that sex is determined due to hormones (rather than genes - i.e. it's not possible to create a breed that biases one sex more than another), and that there is a bias in animal (including human) populations. It's not determined by a simple roll of the dice.

In some insects the female is able to select gender specifically by fertilising the egg with sperm or withholding it.

In others, it seems that it has to do with ambient temperature, abundance of food, etc. If there are enough resources to make a large offspring, the most optimal one is produced that can benefit by being largest. In turtles it's a female, in crocodiles a male is produced (IIRC).

Anyway, in humans, higher rankers typically have male offspring. Apparently American presidents have had a disproportionately large number of sons. Poorer families typically desire - and apparently some studies indicate produce - more girls. This can again be explained by what is most optimal. It's more common in human societies for males to inherit rank, whereas women can marry into it. So poorer families in some cultures bequeath more wealth to women for dowries so they can try to buy their way into higher classes. By contrast, higher ranking men can father more children.

I'm basically regurgitating what I've been reading in The Red Queen. Not my ideas - check out the book. It's very interesting.

American presidents aren't exactly a large sample size. I seriously doubt any statistically interesting data can be derived from such a small set.

Sample sizes have nothing to do with it. If you want to study the determinants of presidency in the US it's a 1:1 sample.

I keep repeating this on news.ycombinator: statistical analysis is predicated on the prior hypothesis that the stuff you're measuring is orthogonal to the stuff that you can't measure.

So: what are we measuring? What are we _not_ measuring? Is our theory that people exerting power have more testosterone and hence have more sons? That can be tested in wider populations, and including presidents might just be a huge confounding factors. Is it that presidents become powerful because they have the Mystery Factor, and that, too, is behind the excess sons?

If, by construction, only presidents have the Mystery Factor, we have to start from there. But then we need theories about the Mystery Factor to test. And controls, men who haven't become president by a matter of chance, and so on.

On the other hand: you can have huge datasets generated from website design tests and still end up doing "A/A testing" and such cargo cult statistics, complete with sacrifices to the gods of large sample sizes.

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