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You've Got Male: Amazon's Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene

Posted by timothy on from the truth-in-action dept.

reifman (786887) writes "San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates. But, if you're a straight male thinking of moving to Seattle to work in technology, think again. Seattle's gender ratio is even more imbalanced and it's about to get much worse for men. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women."

4 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Already mostly debunked... by thatseattleguy · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Seattle Times has already debunked this, pointing out that the author(*) of that original article coflated two data sets that used completely different methodologies for the "number of single men" metric and so cannot be compared. Not that that will make any difference; I sense this will have the same life of its own as the "chances of a woman getting married after 40 are worse than that of her getting killed by a terrorist" meme that went around a decade or so ago, because it provides a convenient external explanation for a wholly internal failure.
    .

    /tsg/

    (*) Said author of the original debunked article also has the same user name as the submitter here - such a coincidence! I also note his last Slashdot submission was the also-debunked "OMG! Skydiver catches meteor falling on camera!" thing that was proven false a few days later. The Force is not strong with this one, fellow Jedi...

    1. Re:Already mostly debunked... by thatseattleguy · · Score: 4, Informative
      More importantly, the above-referenced Times blog post points out that the gender imbalance in Seattle is nowhere near as bad as other cities that are tech hubs, like San Jose. Among the 50 largest metro areas in the US, Seattle apparently ranks at only 15th for predominance of males.
      .

      Noting, too: the original Reifman article makes the truly odd presumption that because Amazon's _current_ workforce is 75% male, that all new hires will necessarily follow this same 3-to-1 male-to-female gender ratio - something I very much doubt. A company growing as fast and expanding into new, diverse areas like Amazon is, is likely to see a greatly more gender-balanced workforce than it had in its early tech-dominated early days. Maybe the new hires will not be 1:1 male:female - but certainly not the 3:1 of the past.

  2. Mercer Girls by MDMurphy · · Score: 4, Informative

    If this is not debunked, then it's not a new issue for Seattle.

    The Mercer Girls were an 1860s project of Asa Shinn Mercer, an American who lived in Seattle, who decided to "import" women to the Pacific Northwest to balance the gender ratio.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

    Which inspired the TV series:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

  3. Re:0.0002% are H1B by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Considering that the number of H1Bs is limited to 0.0002% of the population, they might make a good scapegoat, but tthey make essentially zero impact on anything.

    It may be .0002% of the total US population, but it's not a uniform distribution across all states, cities, and companies.