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The famously skewed sex ratio in San Jose, California — the seat of the male-dominated tech industry — has inspired endless trend pieces about dating in Silicon Valley. It even prompted a matchmaking service to start a campaign earlier this year to ship single women from New York to the Bay Area.
A new analysis from the Pew Researcher Center confirms the odds are good (statistically, at least) for ladies seeking a male partner: In 2012, for every 100 single women in the San Jose area, there were 114 single employed men, between 25 and 34 years old. That's the highest such ratio among large metropolitan areas in the United States. [I Don't: 5 Myths About Marriage]
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Among big cities in the United States, these 10 had the largest share of young single men who were currently employed.
(Image credit: Pew Research Center)
Denver, Colorado, wasn't far behind San Jose, with 101 single employed men for every 100 single women. San Diego, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Seattle, Washington, were also on Pew's top-10 list.
Memphis, Tennessee, had the fewest eligible bachelors of large metropolitan areas, with just 59 employed, young single men for every 100 young single women. Jacksonville, Florida; Detroit, Michigan; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were ranked in the bottom 10.
Throughout the country, single young men outnumber single women by a ratio of 115 to 100. But when Pew researchers only looked at young men with jobs, the ratio fell to 84 men for every 100 single women. The Pew analysis of so-called "marriage markets" focused on employed single men because of the results of a recent poll.
Among never-married women who said they were interested in eventually getting married, 78 percent claimed it was "very important" that their potential spouse had a steady job, the survey found. In contrast, only 46 percent of heterosexual, never-married men said the same. Though women outnumber men in college, and more women than ever are the primary breadwinners in their families, old ideas about traditional family roles apparently die hard.
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But those 46 percent of men who want a wife with a steady job might look to the nation's capital. Among large metropolitan areas, Washington, D.C., had the highest ratio of employed single women to single men — 78 to 100.
The full analysis of the marriage market in the United States, including small cities, can be found on Pew's website. Below is an interactive map, courtesy of Pew, that shows the ratios of all single men to women, single women to men, employed men to women and employed women to men.
Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.
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