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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."

23 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like a Marketing opportunity ladies! by AutodidactLabrat · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Sounds like a Marketing opportunity ladies! by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. But the real question is.. by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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

    1. Re:But the real question is.. by harvestsun · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. Re:But the real question is.. by immaterial · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:But the real question is.. by RCL · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      Coding etudes
  3. Re:Which one? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  4. We need to fix the root cause by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:We need to fix the root cause by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:We need to fix the root cause by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:We need to fix the root cause by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    4. Re:We need to fix the root cause by schnell · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "95% of all Slashdot .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
  5. Well.. by cyberchondriac · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

    --

    Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
  6. Re:you've got male by misexistentialist · · Score: 5, Funny

    Give every programmer a secretary?

  7. Re:Presumption by NotDrWho · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  8. 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.

  9. 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...

  10. Pffft... That's not a bad ratio by EmagGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  11. Re:you've got male by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 4, Funny

    >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.

  12. Irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    A company called Amazon has a mostly male work force.

  13. Re:you've got male by Vintermann · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
  14. Re:Even worse just outside Seattle... by pr0fessor · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.