"Date-onomics"

There is a new book out called Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game that explains why educated women can’t get dates (via Newsalert). From the Washington Post:

For many women these days, it’s not “He’s just not that into you” that’s the problem. It’s that “There aren’t enough of him.”

So says Jon Birger, the author of a new book called “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.” The book, which Birger describes as “the least romantic book ever written about dating,” uses demographics, statistics, game theory and other wonky techniques to shed light on the surprising and growing gap between the number of college-educated women and the number of college-educated men.

The main idea is that women have been attending college at much higher rates than men since the 1980s, in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. That has led to a big demographic mismatch for people who want to date and marry others of the same educational level. The dating pool for college-educated people in their 30s now has five women for every four men. For people in their 20s, it’s four women for every three men.

The gap is even more extreme in certain places. In Manhattan, there are 38 percent more female college grads under the age of 25 than college-grad men, according to Birger’s data. The gap is 49 percent in Raleigh, N.C., 86 percent in Miami, 49 percent in Washington and 37 percent in Los Angeles. And it’s not just cities – many rural areas also have these “educated man deficits.”…

If we had had this conversation in the ’50s or ’60s, the gender ratios would be reversed. Many more men than women were graduating from college, and there was gender bias both in secondary schooling and in college admissions. Back then, there was this mindset that young women went to college not to prepare for careers, but to get their “MRS.” So the passage of Title IX in 1972 certainly leveled the playing field.

But I’m reluctant to attribute how we got to “50/50” entirely to Title IX, because women were making gains in college enrollment not just in the U.S., but throughout the Western world, even in countries where the policy push for equal rights evolved more slowly.

There is not much mention of the hostile environment that colleges have become for men and how they are now finishing schools for women. Many men have decided that college is not a welcoming place and that has to play into why men have left in droves. The comments to the article are interesting, particularly this one: