Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Perception Vs Reality - The man drought

Found a very nice data series from the ABS. It's the extended Labour Series data set (6291.0.55.001 - Labour Force, Australia, Detailed - Electronic Delivery, Apr 2012 )
It gives a very detailed snapshot of the Labour force and employment, breaking down into age, sex and marital status
Been playing around with some of the data to see if there really is a "man drought". This is the perception that there are less men than women in the optimum dating/marriage years.Women are always complaining of this effect, so I'm curious whether this is actually true or not based on the statistics.

To calculate this, we will first make some assumptions (like good little economists we are):-

Assumption 1: Prime dating/marriage years are 20-34 for both Male and Female.
Assumption 2: We are assuming that all males and females are heterosexual. Obviously this is not totally correct (most studies put the level of homosexuality in a population at 2%), but if we apply this to both men and women, this should cancel each other out.

So applying these two assumptions and graphing the data, we get the following

Doesn't look like much of a man drought here at all. Non-married men and more numerous than unmarried women. But look what happens when we take out the unemployed men.


Since the early 90's, there are more single women than single employed men in the optimum age groups.

So is it a "Man drought", or an "Working man drought"? Food for thought.

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