You've Got Male: Amazon's Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene 315
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."
Sounds like a Marketing opportunity ladies! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:5, 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.
Irony (Score:5, Funny)
A company called Amazon has a mostly male work force.
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A queen and the worker bees, although they are all female with actual bees. I propose cage fights and sting matches for the singles to prune out the unfit individuals.
Well, yeah. Let's see you try finding office space for those huge Amazonian women!
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But the real question is.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's three hundred million men!
BIG NUMBERS BETTER.
Re:But the real question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't think the numbers are quite as bad as it looks at first glance. I don't think it's really 13 men actively seeking those 10 women, more like 11. There's a large gay population that doesn't compete for female attention, to start with. There is also a very large H1B contingent, which is more interested in getting the attention of a woman in India or the Philippines.
Re:But the real question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
Presumption (Score:2)
So.... just to throw this out there. Why the presumption that Amazon's new hires will be 75% male?
Re:Presumption (Score:5, 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.
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my guess is that it'll result in more married men with underpaid wives working for Amazon.
Luckily IT is a profession where you can usually afford to have only a single household income so my guess is
alot of wives would choose to not work vs taking a low paying job just to have a job.
Which one? (Score:2)
Re:Which one? (Score:5, 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.
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Don't doubt this guy, he knows Irish men, but his spelling tells me it's not Irish-Americans he's talking about. I'll vouch for the Irish-Americans.
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My wife changed from teaching school to becoming a network engineer about 8 years ago. She went from making 40% of my income to making 95% of it in the past 8 years time, and that's with about 30% increase in my income in that time.
She is treated like a professional and doesn't have to deal with the parents of her clients. Yes, there are a lot of clueless "Durr, she's a girl!" nerds that she has to deal with, but she says they are easier to handle than her former students.
So if you are a woman and you are
Re:Which one? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Relationship-quality male ratio sorely lacking (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever date one of those guys at Amazon? All work and no play.
We need to fix the root cause (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.
Re:We need to fix the root cause (Score:5, 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.
Re:We need to fix the root cause (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.
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The problem is all those damn Disney movies parents use as babysitters.
Re:We need to fix the root cause (Score:5, 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.
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My older daughter wants to be a princess when she grows up
Well good luck changing that... I only know one princess and she's a mean, nasty horrible woman.
Actually, she's not a princess anymore, not after India's Independence did away with royalty. She was born a princess of some royal house in Rajasthan just before that. Now she's horribly bitter that she isn't "someone" anymore...
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That seems questionable. The last think you want her interested in anytime soon is erections.
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and your statement is doubleplus ungood. Report to the ministry of love for processing, comrade.
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stop telling little girls that they're pretty
A man my age telling girls that they're pretty is a quick way to get myself labeled a perv.
Besides, if a girl's not pretty, I wouldn't say she's pretty.
And I wouldn't know she's smart w/o spending some time with her, and that's just as creepy.
Re:We need to fix the root cause (Score:5, 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.
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Stop blaming men for the lack of equal outcome. Stop telling men what is 'proper' to look for in a mate. Stop blaming them as the default problem when women aren't seen in the same numbers in a given context. In fact, stop lying about men, period. If women are intrinsically equal, they don't NEED help as they can fend for themselves.. Most women aren't interested in technology for itself, only what it can do for them, so even with incentives, you're not going to find a 50/50 split. This is ok as men and
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yes! 17 yr old, nobody has asked her what she want (Score:3)
> 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.
This! I asked my ex-wife's 17 year old daughter what she wanted to do for a living and they way she looked at me, it seems nobody had ever asked her that question before. She has no idea. My daughter, who is now one week old, will be able toanswer that question by the time she's five (and change her mind
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...and change her mind six times after that).
Well, you know what they say about a woman's perrogative. Wait. Stop throwing things at me. Ow. Ow. Ow.
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Over analyzing the idea.
There are 40 year olds who live in their parent's basements and have no idea what they will do.
There are 40 year olds who are very successful, who still don't know what they want to do.
Very few people know precisely what they want to do.
But by the time they are juniors in high school, they should have some set of skills that can help them move forward as opposed to "being a princess". That is a very limited position, with few available openings, and an excessive amount of competition
you started college in your late 20s? (Score:3)
> couldn't have answered that I wanted to go and do a PhD in computer engineering, or that I wanted to move to Colorado.
> In fact, when I was 22 I still couldn't have told you that.
I bet that at 17 you knew you wanted to go to college and study computers. That's what you wanted to do when you were 17 or so. Maybe later you decided exactly how MUCH college - a PhD. I doubt that at 17 you had no idea what direction you wanted to head. I say that because seventeen year olds with no plan whatsoever are
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Why the fuck should a 17 year old be able to answer that?
Goals. It may not be the same thing they want to do when they are 22 or 30. But they are thinking about something and working toward it.
Dating hint for all you high school guys: Ask a girl what she would study in college and do as a profession. If she doesn't have an immediate answer, run like hell.
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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.
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Queue the legion of people who will insist that Seattle companies be forced to hire less-qualified people who happen to be women.
Why would they queue? This is about America, not England.
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less-qualified people who happen to be women.
And that's why there isn't a problem for many guys. With an attitude like that*, there's a whole class of men that have just removed themselves from the dating pool. The rest of us thank you.
*Very common in the IT and engineering fields.
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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 vict
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And OMG, you might be in danger of getting pushed halfway back to *second*. Eesh.
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Nobody starts out on third base but the children of the wealthy. And there are tens of millions of poor men, even poor white men, that are trapped in crushing generational poverty right along with poor women.
Doesn't get as much press, though. Or as much demagoguery.
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So instead of addressing my points, you resort to ad hominem. gotcha.
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It does, but it's not like that is happening because of your genital configuration. I bet you have plenty of male coworkers that feel the exact same way.
Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
The Space Needle will take on new allegorical significance as a monument!
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Even worse just outside Seattle... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even worse just outside Seattle... (Score:5, 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.
Already mostly debunked... (Score:5, Informative)
.
(*) 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... (Score:5, Informative)
.
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.
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Nice to also notice that he submits the same article 2 or more times over the course of a day or so, guess he takes advantage of finding the right editor to approve his rubbish.
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So that's why so many women perked up when 9/11 happened!
This is just within the city limits, though (Score:3)
Seattle proper is actually relatively small, and surrounded by dozens of smaller cities and towns. I would wager that the overall metro area has close to a 1:1 ratio, but that young, single men tend to move into the city to be close to work, especially before starting a family. Housing in the city is expensive, but more livable for someone in a 1-bedroom or studio apartment. Once you need more space than that, the suburbs are much more appealing.
Mercer Girls (Score:5, 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... [wikipedia.org]
Which inspired the TV series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
Here Come the Brides (Score:2)
The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle
And the hills are green as green in Seattle
Am I the only one that remembers that 70's western comedy show?
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I've found the perfect solution (Score:3)
I gave up.
Look, masturbation's more efficient anyway.
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You sound like a real wanker.
I'm going to Surf City (Score:2)
sounds like an economic opportunity... (Score:2)
...for smart business-orientated women to start-up the world's oldest profession in the Seattle area.
oh...Tinder's already covering that base.
nothing wrong with that (Score:2, Insightful)
Pffft... That's not a bad ratio (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was going to Georgia Tech, I would have given anything for a 1.3:1 ratio.
Irrelevant (Score:2)
Sausage Fest (Score:2)
By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women.
Worst. Orgy. Ever.
Of all time.
whole China & India are like that (Score:2)
So do what everybody else does (Score:2)
...produce a musical comedy.
Where is .... (Score:3)
Re:you've got male (Score:5, Funny)
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Balancing workforces is an interesting problem. I would also like to see more balancing but in a different
area. It would be nice if you could balance jobs so that they are 50% desk and 50% physical instead of
a majority of jobs being either 100% sitting on your butt or 100% physically exhausting.
If you created jobs with varying attributes and varying responsibilities then it might also help issues like
gender issues as alot of gender biases in occupation come down to gender differences. Women are
more likel
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I'm intrigued that the feminists aren't demanding that Amazon employ more women to do a low paid physically demanding and boring job.
Guess they don't want equality after all.
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Like, say, men who make random generalizations about women?
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Re:you've got male (Score:5, Funny)
I think you're projecting your social phobia onto other men. Many of us are fine dealing with people.
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Oh the Irony of someone who claims to have strong social skills missing an obvious sociological/cultural argument, not a personal argument.
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Cross Cultural Sex Differences put men as more introverted. [wikipedia.org] The sex differences are larger in more egalitarian societies. Probably because men and women are freer to do what they like.
Perhaps do a split second of research before jumping to conclusions? Your subtle shaming of the introverted is equally as retarding as the phobia you're projecting.
English usage tip (Score:3)
a lot of women = a number of human females greater than an arbitrary number larger than 2, depending on context
a lot of Woman = one human female with a big personality or big physical measurements of one sort or another, or both.
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and so the stereotypes abide... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:you've got male (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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In 1974 the percentage of computer science graduates who were female was about 16.5%; slightly lower than today
Wi
Re:you've got male (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I suspect this isn't so bad for American men as the OP lets on. Consider the effect of H1Bs on these numbers... I live in Seattle; all the large tech companies here (and even a lot of the smaller ones) hire a disproportionate number of H1B holders, most from India. Most Indians aren't after American women, they either come here with a wife already, or their family back in India arranges a marriage, they fly home for a few weeks and come back married.
I know plenty of single girls, and I've never had a problem finding a date. It does require leaving work at work and going out to places where other single people congregate, and it helps to not be a total jackass, but I don't think we're really anywhere near as unbalanced as this would lead one to believe.
I think you missed the point -- the ratio is projected to get around 30% worse in the near future. Same number of women, 30% more jackasses.
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I think you missed the point -- the ratio is projected to get around 30% worse in the near future. Same number of women, 30% more jackasses.
Actually, it's you who missed the point:
"By the end of 2014, Reifman projects, there will be 130 single men in Seattle for every 100 single women — up from a ratio of 119 single men to 100 single women in April 2010."
So, it's not "Same number of women, 30% more jackasses," it's "Same number of women, 9% more jackasses."
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Considering that the number of H1Bs is limited to 0.0002% of the population, they might make a good scapegoat, but tthey make essentially zero impact on anything.
It may be .0002% of the total US population, but it's not a uniform distribution across all states, cities, and companies.
1,000 times concentration is still 0.2% (Score:2)
Suppose one area had 1000X as many H1B as average. That area would have 0.2% H1B.
83% of people think they are smarter than average.
Which means that nearly half of the people who THINK they are smart are actually dumb. All of those people search for some expanation of why they didn't get hired. They are certainly smart enough, they think.
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When the contacted me about a job in Seattle after I checked the box on their application that said I would not relocate I ignored the email. I got another one from the same recruiter a week later that was acting as though I were the rude one and that she had done me a favor by showing interest in hiring me for a totally undefined job in a location that I had no interest in moving to.
I have no idea why anybody works for them... they sure don't make the company seem appealing.
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Sounds like a recruiting firm was hired for these and not internal HR. Recruiting firms are more interested in filling body counts and getting people to interview, and finally placed within the company.
Dunno... I'll like Seattle more when they get an NHL team.
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Sorry to crush your dreams but prostitution is not dating.
Re:easy answer (Score:4, Funny)
Are they Amazon Prime eligible?