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

Sounds like a Marketing opportunity ladies!

[AutodidactLabrat]

Tell me ladies, are you not very attractive, given to big glasses and serious introspection?
COME TO SILICON VALLEY, learn useless coding techniques, give out buggy code and ask the nerdiest soon-to-be-billionaire to help you grow in the profession.
After the divorce, you won't ever have to work again!

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.

But the real question is..

[DoofusOfDeath]

Will it have 13 men per 10 women? 26 men per 20 women?

Will it even have... 30% more men than women???

Re:But the real question is..

[harvestsun]

1,300,000,000 men to every 1,000,000,000 women!
That's three hundred million men!
BIG NUMBERS BETTER.

Re:But the real question is..

[immaterial]

1.3 men for every woman. Of course, the women see through this - the extra 0.3 he's claiming is typical male exaggeration.

Re:But the real question is..

[RCL]

No, it will have 1.3 men per one woman. Roughly one man and one Javascript programmer per each woman.

Re:Which one?

[DoofusOfDeath]

As a woman I think this must be great news! But as a foreigner - should I aim for Seattle or San Fransisco?

If you're a foreigner, I'd recommend treating the world as your oyster. Personally, I can vouch for the rogueish good looks, sense of humour, and alcohol tolerance of Irish men.

But if you're in a pinch, I guess there are a few expats in Seattle and San Francisco.

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

[Grishnakh]

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.

These suggestions are un-American to the point of being treasonous.

Re:We need to fix the root cause

[Anonymous Coward]

My older daughter wants to be a princess when she grows up. My attempt to steer her into mathematics is so far a failure. I still have hope for my younger daughter. I've taken away her dolls and replaced them with legos and erector sets. She cries about it and says she hates me. I guess she just doesn't understand I'm liberating her from the Patriarchy.

Re:We need to fix the root cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't praise kids for being smart, it becomes a major part of their identity and whenever some situation comes along that they fail to resolve it can mess them up and they will avoid even attempting things that can result in them feeling not smart. Praise them for working hard, etc.

Re:We need to fix the root cause

[epyT-R]

Alright, but that means no more privilege for women either:

1. No more chattel, alimony, maternity leave, her body/right/choice is his responsibility etc. Women have to live without the privilege men are currently compelled to give them in order for men to truly see them as equals.

2. No more subjecting men to coquettish behavior in order to get them to clean up after her mess (I've seen this one go down a lot at work, especially when she knows she's attractive). Don't tell me that women are toothless victims in the work place. It's sexual manipulation all the same. Conversely, we could let up on the draconian 'anti harrassment' policies and let both sexes feel more comfortable acting like human beings at work. The latter is my preference, but it requires that women quit playing the crocodile tear victim act when propositioned by a man they don't like/find 'creepy', and expecting society (mainly other men) to white knight for her (get him fired, kick the crap out of him etc).

3. No more male space vs female space. No more 'invade-male-space-and-make-it-female-for-great-social-justice' either. If most of the employees are male, deal with it instead of calling it out as 'oppression', just as you expect men to accept female space. They are different and, in many ways, incompatible. If a women is going into a male dominated field, she should expect not to find female space all that often.. Same thing if a man goes into nursing. Both sexes need to make their choices and live with the positive and negative outcomes. Neither one should be obligated to shield the other from this.

4. No more hair trigger, life ruining, over the top responses to mere accusations of misconduct. No more 'dear colleague' letters from politicians pushing this. In fact, it's time for the state to stop passing legislation that picks the winners and losers solely on the attributes that aren't supposed to matter.

Once that's in place, I'd be more open to viewing the sexes as equal, and feel more comfortable treating women's work output and interaction as that of a human being instead of a goddess just to avoid getting fired. I don't know if you're reasonable or not, but a lot of the women I have run across at work do think of themselves as above reproach, and play the victim card when they're challenged. Society's hypocritical status quo encourages it en masse.

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:We need to fix the root cause

[schnell]

The problem is all those damn Disney movies parents use as babysitters.

Not necessarily. When we had our first girl, my wife and I deliberately kept her away from all things Disney and princess-y to avoid just this situation.

Guess what happened? By age two, she was already trying to wear mommy's high heels and had firmly decided her future vocation would be fairy ballerina - all without ever having seen a Disney/Barbie/whatever TV show, not having any dress-up dolls, or any of the other stereotypical toys that I had always assumed were what caused the gender role identification in young girls. It turns out that some little girls just love "girly" things because it's baked into their DNA somewhere.

Well..

[cyberchondriac]

I suppose if you're a gay male that sounds like Utopia. Welcome to Seattle, the new San Francisco.
The Space Needle will take on new allegorical significance as a monument!

Even worse just outside Seattle...

[xfade551]

Everett, Tacoma-Lakewood-Puyallup, and Kitsap County have massive military populations (figure around 80-90% male for the military subpopulation). There's a tendency for the junior enlisted men to marry the local girls right out of high school, then they move away with their young wives on their next assignment. (These women often divorce their husbands when they find a place they like better than their hometown). ...And around 50% of the women left behind aren't worth dating.

Re:Even worse just outside Seattle...

[pr0fessor]

I grew up next to a military base and can confirm that and as a freshman in high school I could not get a date with any girls at my school because they were all dating soldiers. Instead their 19-22yr old wives were all very lonely... I once took a 22yr old soldier's wife to a school dance because, I knew he would be there with his 16yr old date.

Re:you've got male

[misexistentialist]

Give every programmer a secretary?

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.

Already mostly debunked...

[thatseattleguy]

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...

Re:Already mostly debunked...

[thatseattleguy]

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.

Mercer Girls

[MDMurphy]

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...

Pffft... That's not a bad ratio

[EmagGeek]

When I was going to Georgia Tech, I would have given anything for a 1.3:1 ratio.

Re:Which one?

[khr]

should I aim for Seattle or San Fransisco?

I don't know much about San Fransisco, but I do know the weather in Seattle, while uncomfortably dry is less so than most other cities... If I had to pick between them, I'd probably go for whichever gets more annual rainfall.

Re:you've got male

[jeffmflanagan]

>Men should have jobs avoiding people.

I think you're projecting your social phobia onto other men. Many of us are fine dealing with people.

Re:I've found the perfect solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a real wanker.

Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

A company called Amazon has a mostly male work force.

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.

and so the stereotypes abide...

[globaljustin]

not against women...the stereotypes about how "tech" work has to be autism-inducing, basement dewelling, spaghetti coding, geek competition

1. Culturally: Tech jobs, even coding, involves directly working with the people in your workplace. Even if you telecommute you still do tons of human interaction...furthermore, all tech is ultimately for the *human user*

2. Geeky Culture: "geek culture" has never been more popular among women, especially smart younger women who would be the logical next cadre of tech new hires. The problem is stereotypes and systemic dead weight...not 'geek culture' or women's access to it...also: more women gamers now than ever

3. Catch 22: Men who tend to make assumptions will tend to assume the wrong causes for women's behavior...especially men in tech who don't usually work with women

4. Peer pressure: Everything in our media tells women that if they want to get married they have to **look like a pornstar** and be permiscous but not "slutty" and find the right man before they turn 30...when a woman says she thinks she can have a career, party, look good AND have a family their friends will try to dissuade them.

get a clue...everyone...all techies....everywhere....talk to women about this...not just the opinionated ones...ask them how they feel and you'll seem I'm right

tech alienates women...it's a dorky version of a Country Club mentality

Re:easy answer

[Richy_T]

Are they Amazon Prime eligible?

Re:you've got male

[linuxrocks123]

It has nothing to do with a "strange geek religion of human equality". What it has to do with is that most evolutionary psychology is non-falsifiable. You can't use it to make predictions. Here's an example:

Observation: Women go for geek guys.
Reason: Humans evolved intelligence, because intelligence confers many advantages, so displays of intelligence attract mates.

Observation: Women don't go for geek guys.
Reason: Geek guys tend to work out less, because they're so obsessed with technology, and physical fitness is a good predictor of health, which is a good predictor of good genes, so women tend to prefer people who work out more. Also, intelligence has only recently become important to human success, so women haven't had enough time to evolve attraction based on intelligence.

Do you get it? Evolutionary psychology "sounds nice", but it's so soft that it very often (perhaps not always, but very often) falls on the "bullshit" side of the science/bullshit line. Many smart people on Slashdot can see that, so we don't buy into it.

It's not all bullshit. I remember reading one study in AP Psychology in high school where they actually did a bona fide scientific experiment related to evolutionary psychology, using it to make a hypothesis that they didn't know the truth of, and then testing it. I don't remember at all what it was, unfortunately, but I remember being impressed.

One other aspect that turns us off about evolutionary psychology is that a lot of (typically amateur ) proponents of it seem to promote the naturalistic fallacy: even if you're a dick because evolution made you that way, it doesn't mean you're not a dick.

Also, fuck beta.