Head Scratchers

Do Women Earn More Money In Cities Where There Are Fewer Men?

Earlier this month we wrote about the 10 cities where women earn the most. This week Huffington Post put out a list of the best places for single ladies to find the menfolk. Here is the list of dude-filled cities.

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. Honolulu, HI
3. Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL
4. Gary, IND
5. San Jose, CA
6. Salt Lake City, UT
7. Miami, FL
8. Worcester, MA
9. Allentown, PA-NJ
10. Tacoma, WA

HuffPo also provided the list of cities where there are way more women than men. The list includes:

1. Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick, MD
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Boston, MA
4. New York, NY-NJ
5. Raleigh, NC
6. Richmond, VA
7. Atlanta, GA
8. Baltimore, MD
9. Peabody, MA
10. Oakland, CA

Looking at this list, we couldn’t help but notice that the cities where women outnumber the men aso happen to be where women earn more money. Washington D.C. was the top earning city for women and on this list it is number two. Boston was also a top ten salary city for women and is number three on this list.  New York also made it on to both lists (it was number 14 for salaries.)

Is there a correlation between cities with fewer men and women earning more? The ratio of women to men tends to be highest in larger metropolitan areas. But is it possible that women are getting more opportunities in these cities because there are fewer men? That’s a depressing though. Then again, these women earning more money could all be married or in serious relationships.

On the other hand, I absolutely refuse to believe that these data points have anything to do with an absurd study that says women who aren’t surrounded by available men focus more on their careers, partly out of fear that they won’t find a husband.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, says: “A substantial portion of women in Northern Europe achieved economic parity with men during the late 12^th century.” This “relatively short-lived” phenomenon (it had largely faded away 100 years later) occurred during a period when there was “a scarcity of marriageable men,” the researchers write.

The “local mating ecology,” impacts the career choices of women, except for those who don’t doubt their ability to find a long-term partner, according to the study. Well that is one way of looking at it. A really depressing way that basically puts us in the same boat as characters in Jane Austen novels.

I’d rather conclude that women are pursuing the jobs they want regardless of mating ecology. Many women don’t need husbands to provide economic support, which could be a major factor in why the number of single adults rose to 50%  in 2010, compared to 33% in 1950, according to census data. And in her famous “All The Single Ladies” Atlantic article Kate Bolick wrote, “According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44% of Millennials and 43% of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.”

A lot of women, of course, do want to get married but aren’t approaching it with the sense of urgency that generations of women before them did. Women are moving to cities, often alone, because of the opportunities they present — not just dating prospects. Except for women that move to Wyoming. I am pretty sure that is all about cowboys and horses.

 

TAGS: marriage | professional women | single women | study

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