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

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."

Comments

We need to fix the root cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Queue the legion of people who will insist that Seattle companies be forced to hire less-qualified people who happen to be women.

If this bothers you: stop telling little girls that they're pretty, and instead tell them that they're smart. Don't ask them their favorite princess, ask them what they want to be when they grow up.

Re:We need to fix the root cause

[Nutria]

Invent a DNA-manipulating machine, jump in the (original) Way Back Machine *with* the DNA-manipulating machine. Travel back to the origin of class Mammalia, and fiddle with all the bits of DNA that cause males to be on average relatively bigger and relatively more aggressive, while females are on average relatively smaller and relatively more nurturing.

Of course, then we wouldn't exist (the changes would be so great and so ancient that Mammalia would be *radically* different), but that's ok, because we're evil planet-rapers anyway.

Seriously, though: find me a culture, any culture, where the males are feminized, and I'll show you a not very successful culture.

Re:Presumption

[NotDrWho]

Why the presumption that Amazon's new hires will be 75% male?

Well, about 85% of CS grads today are male. But if it makes you feel better, they could hire more women for the packing floor.

Re:Sounds like a Marketing opportunity ladies!

[Darinbob]

No, it's more like work long hours with your partner to create a dual income family and still be unable to afford a decent house close to work. Occasionally you will meet someone who has a friend who knows someone who made enough money to retire early.

Re:you've got male

[Vintermann]

It is 2014. It is not 1974.

Funny you should say that, as the rate of female computer science graduates was apparently higher back then.

Whatever biology says, we see that the gender ratio varies greatly with time and place. Our biology hasn't changed much since the 70s, so we can at the very least get the gender ratio back to what it was then. Probably, our biology is flexible enough to support pretty much any gender ratio.

This means we can probably change things, if we really go for it. The question is should we? The issue is that a society can score high on gender egalitarianism, and high on opportunities for everyone, and yet that seems only to make people make more traditional choices when it comes to education. What does that mean?

I haven't got an answer. But this is a "should" question - so no naturalistic fallacy, please.