I assume for housing cost and class/education reasons also that the 25-34yo men who have selected to be in London are disproportionately likely to be in a relationship (quite possibly a cohabiting one) also
Living in Nottingham in the early 2000s there was always talk about women outnumbered men "two to one". A zombie stat promoted by dating apps, student reps and stage do companies.
Truth was Nottingham had a lot of women working in the lace mills in the 1860s and lost a lot of men in WW2
I remember this coming up a lot when looking at university choices, though I think at one point it was five to one. Which didn't seem entirely plausible.
I remember in the early 2000’s that the female - male ratio in Bosnia, especially in areas of Serbian Republic was apparently quite high. Was rumoured in places like Banja Luka it was 5 - 1.
Complete aside, but is it true that men are more likely to take the tube and women busses? I know my wife much prefers the bus over the tube, but I never considered that a gender-bias
I don't think it's preference (anecdata says I and most female friends prefer trains) but maybe that women end up disproportionately on buses cause of journey type. Children to school, supermarket shop, taking them to swimming lessons - all bus journeys, not tube ones 🤔
It’s discussed in Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez (not for London specifically but the idea of trip chaining, doing lots of journeys often locally as women are more likely to be doing caring and shopping etc)
There may also be impact from the geographic nature of employment sectors where women are heavily represented - e.g. retail, health/social care, education: these are less centralised, so journeys are more likely to be suburb-suburb, often requiring a bus as a mainly radial rail network doesn’t work.
wouldn't surprise me if it was broadly true that the the male-female ratio in urban cores was falling everywhere, but I'd also want to see some data confirming it first because there are a range of reasons it could be working slightly different here.
yep for the most part - though I suspect in a rapidly growing area like Mecklenburg County it looks different than an established megacity like NYC or Chicago.
Absolutely true, Mr Davies, but don't you think both int'l and domestic migration among young people into London consists disproportionately of college grads, given the nature of London's cost levels and job base?🤔
all about housing, right? can only speak for London but our rents have been going mental for the past few years, can only afford that if, yeah, you went to uni and have a good or decent enough career
I'd say that in my part of the job market, the move to hybrid and remote work has substantially reduced the pressure to migrate from regions to London for work. I can imagine that male overrepresentation tech and finance sectors could also factor in?
This tracks. Male adult children living with parents outnumber females 3 to 2. Other side of the same coin of course. But inability to make rent must be the key driver.
definitely a major driver but I think not the only one.
for US cities would guess incarceration is part of the problem and also we do more resource extraction than you guys do, which are a bunch of high paying jobs that are not urban
but maybe we could all try building housing and see if it helps?
It did! Sex and the City syndrome, they called it, the theory being women moved to NYC to capture that lifestyle, though that's not especially likely to be the main pull factor.
Quite possibly. It always seems to still have that « everyone goes there after uni and it reshuffles the country » thing that London used to have (and Brussels has at a European scale but weirdly not a Belgian scale)
We should have a whole policy agenda targeting the under 40s, only. Housing, wages, healthcare, funding, transport…
Aim everything at our most productive demographic. I honestly believe it couldn’t fail as a strategy.
I'm pretty sure men aged 25-34 in London are also statistically somewhat more likely than the national average to be uninterested in relationships with women - definitely somewhere that gay guys move to rather than from.
I'm sure there's an awful lot of nuance here, but I do find it mystifying how both men and women seem to agree dating is terrible and they can't find who they are looking for - despite ongoing incentives for single people to learn what potential partners want and try to provide it.
It's like the property market when market conditions are terrible. Sellers complain about lack of buyers, buyers complain that there's nothing good on the market.
A long term solution would be for women to reduce their standards *and* for men to tart themselves up, but unrealistic expectations can prevail for a very long time in any market.
lol I'm sorry, going to come in quite aggressively on this, but I see so little proof of women having standards that are "too high" - basically every chat I have with female friends is "oh my god he has a job and he asks me questions and he's clean and seems normal!!!", the bar is SO LOW for men
I don't think women have high standards but I do think the average man is actively punished by algorithms (shown to fewer people) on dating apps because that's the best way for those businesses to extract money. And I'd imagine most men are trying to find women via these apps
Oh men are completely hopeless. Sorry if I gave the impression that I thought otherwise. The ones on the market are like those properties you see at the depths of a bear market, thrashed into the ground with the doors hanging off the hinges.
But that's what prospective buyers have to consider.
think that especially post 30 if you're just like, a guy with an ok career who can take care of himself, doesn't look like Quasimodo and is capable of stringing sentences together, it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel, whereas I know so many *amazing* women who remain stubbornly, sadly single
Have told this story before but my now-fiancée tells me I was the first man - ever - on a dating app to reference something in her profile when initiating a conversation. It’s below sea level for sure.
I am very old, but even in the archaic 1980s I was getting oodles of sex by the simple strategy of *checks notes* taking an interest in what women had to say and treating them as humans.
I thought Alistair was joking there - the riff being the comparison to the property market and what I guess is standard Estate Agent feedback when you note that what is on offer for £2k a month ain't all that great.
The experience of people I know working in London is that entry level roles are now generally filled by people (of all genders) living at home with family rather than people moving to the capital and into houseshares. Rent's too high for people to feel they can come, and too high to leave.
Also the idea now that renting is 'dead money' that you could put toward a house deposit, which, yes, but also not doing that is seen as more valuable than the independence (esp wrt dating) you get from living away from the parental home - not seen as value for money, I guess.
I suspect gendered expectations of housework are also a key factor here, on average a man who stays at home is going to be asked to do less than a woman.
The data doesn't seem to be saying that the men are staying in their parental home, just that not as many of them live in London as previously. It could equally be that those 7% of men are allowed to work from home were as women are more likely to be working in service industries?
The data in the screengrab doesn’t, but the data does show that men are more likely to stay in their parental home, and given that London is an importer of young people, we would expect that to have a gendered effect on London’s makeup.
Or (anecdata again) if they want to fly the nest and get a really well-paid job, oil rigs/Australian mines/etc probably v appealing (whereas a lot of the city jobs done by computers now)...
Non-Londoner here, but really like the way 'a few graphs about transport' open up so many other conversations about society, both in and outside the capital.
You almost fooled us but I see what’s really going on. You’re clearly masterminding some kind of muesli fuelled feminist purge of innocent young men - starting with the seat of government.
wonder if this might be related to educational performance among younger people - the labour market and (consequently) economic geography implications of women educationally outperforming men
Yeah, I suspect tbh this probably explains some part of the complaints about a dysfunctional dating pool in any reasonably sized (even 2nd/3rd tier cities) western city, particularly amongst graduates
turned on its head you're getting the effect Germany has in the former East - lots of young, left behind men in left behind places (in the UK, a bit more pronounced because almost everything other than London is left behind) who get angry and vote for the Nazis. Yay.
Comments
Truth was Nottingham had a lot of women working in the lace mills in the 1860s and lost a lot of men in WW2
VOICEOVER: "the year is 2030. the city - London. gangs of feral 25-34 year old women roam the streets."
Men Women
'20-'23 Growth +4.3% +5.2%
2020 2023
Male-Female Ratio 0.960 0.952
for US cities would guess incarceration is part of the problem and also we do more resource extraction than you guys do, which are a bunch of high paying jobs that are not urban
but maybe we could all try building housing and see if it helps?
Aim everything at our most productive demographic. I honestly believe it couldn’t fail as a strategy.
It's like the property market when market conditions are terrible. Sellers complain about lack of buyers, buyers complain that there's nothing good on the market.
Men are sellers, women are buyers.
1/2
Or people can just stay put.
2/2
But that's what prospective buyers have to consider.
Super superficial reading of those numbers is, the guys who are planning for a future don't see London city and suburbs as sustainable.