When men and women are miles apart....

The Globe and Mail website doesn't cope with data and graphics easily, so I'm reproducing my most recent Economy Lab post, along with data tables that couldn't be included in the G&M piece, here:

The latest Census release provides us with a new and vital insight into Canadian demographics: Petawawa, Ontario is the best place in Canada to meet a man. It has the highest percentage of men in what Statistics Canada calls the “working aged” population – 55.5 percent – of any community in the country.

Canadian communities with the highest percentage of "working aged" men
Geographic name	Number men 15-64	Men as percentage of 15-64 age group	Over 65s as percentage of all men
Petawawa (Ont.)	6,400	55.5%	6.3
Wood Buffalo (Alta.)	29,235	55.1%	1.8
Brooks (Alta.)	8,500	53.3%	8.9
Estevan (Sask.)	4,775	53.1%	10.3
Cold Lake (Alta.)	5,265	53.0%	5
Leamington (Ont.)	17,040	52.4%	14.3
Fort St. John (B.C.)	9,920	52.3%	6.2
Grande Prairie (Alta.)	20,720	51.9%	5.3
Lloydminster (Alta.)	10,995	51.4%	7.6
Thompson (Man.)	4,650	51.2%	4.5
Baie-Comeau (Que.)	10,295	51.2%	14.6
Canada	11,344,355	49.5%	13.4

 

The Canadian communities with the most working aged men have a number of distinguishing characteristics. They’re small – the largest ones in the top 10 list are Wood Buffalo and Leamington.  Their economies are based around the military and resource extraction. And they’re young – in Wood Buffalo, Alberta, only 1.8 percent of men are over 65.  

But not everyone wants to join the army or move to Fort St John. Focusing on major cities – those with over 150,000 men between the ages of 15 to 64 – the message is clear: head to Alberta to meet men.  Edmonton and Calgary are the only two large cities in Canada with more working aged men than women. Toronto, on the other hand, is the best place to meet women.

Men as percentage of working age population, cities with over 150,000 working age men.
Cities with over 150,000 men between the ages of 15 and 64.	Men: 15 to 64 years (2011 counts)	Men as percentage of total working aged population
Edmonton (Alta.)	415,185	50.5%
Calgary (Alta.)	440,195	50.4%
Kitchener - Cambridge - Waterloo (Ont.)	164,790	49.7%
Québec (Que.)	261,885	49.7%
Canada	11,344,355	49.5%
Winnipeg (Man.)	248,545	49.5%
Montréal (Que.)	1,302,310	49.5%
Hamilton (Ont.)	238,415	49.1%
Vancouver (B.C.)	807,195	49.0%
Ottawa - Gatineau (Ont.)	425,615	49.0%
London (Ont.)	158,695	48.9%
Toronto (Ont.)	1,897,350	48.6%

 

Youth, of course, isn’t everything. Some people use a “half your age plus seven rule”. For example, a 40 year old man can date a woman who is half his age (20) plus seven years, or 27 years old. Inverting this rule, a woman can date a man who is her age less seven times two – that is, a 47 year old woman can expect to be sought after by men up to 80 years old - 2x( 47-7). Taking into account the entire population age range, the order of Canada’s cities moves around a bit, but the same pattern emerges: the most male cities are the ones in the West: Calgary, and then Alberta.

Men as percentage of total population, Cities with over 150,000 men of any age.
Cities with over 150,000 men (all age groups)	Total number of males	Percent male
Calgary (Alta.)	606,870	50.0%
Edmonton (Alta.)	578,975	49.9%
Kitchener - Cambridge - Waterloo (Ont.)	234,900	49.2%
Canada	16,414,230	49.0%
Vancouver (B.C.)	1,130,375	48.9%
Windsor (Ont.)	155,985	48.9%
Oshawa (Ont.)	173,815	48.8%
Winnipeg (Man.)	355,955	48.8%
Montréal (Que.)	1,861,525	48.7%
Ottawa - Gatineau (Ont.)	601,265	48.6%
Hamilton (Ont.)	350,650	48.6%
Québec (Que.)	371,860	48.6%
Toronto (Ont.)	2,708,955	48.5%
London (Ont.)	229,950	48.4%
Halifax (N.S.)	188,700	48.3%
St. Catharines - Niagara (Ont.)	189,400	48.3%
Victoria (B.C.)	165,505	48.0%

 

 The cities with the lowest percentage of men are home to female-friendly industries such as insurance (London, Ontario), financial services (Toronto), public administration (Ottawa-Gatineau and Victoria), and education (Hamilton). The relationship between industrial structure and gender suggests that women may face a trade-off between finding a job in a field of their choice and finding a partner (unless, of course, their field of choice is joining the army or driving a truck in the oil sands, or their preferred partner is another woman).

Looking at the working aged population smaller communities, another interesting phenomenon starts to emerge. Men appear to be moving away from communities in Atlantic Canada, places like Cape Breton, Charlottetown, and Summerside. Even though Charlottetown’s population is younger than the Canadian average, it still has relatively few men.  Presumably this is where some of the men in Estevan and Cold Lake are coming from.

The Canadian communities with the lowest percentage of working aged men
Geographic name	Number men 15-64	Men as percentage of 15-64 age group	Over 65s as percentage of all men
Cape Breton (N.S.)	32,225	47.9%	17.4
Charlottetown (P.E.I.)	21,215	47.8%	13.1
Courtenay (B.C.)	16,685	47.6%	21.8
Grand Falls-Windsor (N.L.)	4,315	47.6%	16.9
Summerside (P.E.I.)	5,085	47.6%	16.5
Collingwood (Ont.)	5,750	47.6%	20.1
Salmon Arm (B.C.)	5,120	47.5%	22.2
Cobourg (Ont.)	5,265	47.5%	23.5
Elliot Lake (Ont.)	2,925	47.1%	35
Parksville (B.C.)	6,670	46.0%	38
Canada	11,344,355	49.5%	13.4

 

 

As a community’s population gets older, it also gets more female dominated. Taking all age groups and all communities together, the most female-dominated places in Canada are retirement communities such as Parksville and Eliot Lake – places where over a third of the men are over 65.

One thing that is puzzling, however, is that even though Canada’s population has aged in the past five years, it has not become more female dominated overall. The percentage of the overall Canadian population who are males rose to 49.03 percent in 2011, up from to 48.95 percent in 2006. To figure out why that happened, we’ll have to wait for the release of the results of more detailed data from the National Household Survey.

 

Comments

[Determinant]

It's not puzzling, male life expectancy has increased faster than female life expectancy. The advent of statins has greatly reduced the chances of heart disease and the decline of smoking (which leads to heart disease, stroke and cancer, among other things) has benefited men more as more men smoked proportionately than women. The male-female life expectancy gap has been closing steadily for the last twenty years, it is now down to 2.5 years.

Men were simply fortunate to have a risk profile which benefited more from medical advances and behaviour changes than women's risk profile.

[Frances Woolley]

Determinant - looking at the numbers, though, I'm guessing some of it is coming from immigration also, because those more-female communities are almost all places that don't attract many immigrants. There was also a bit of a baby boom in the mid-2000s. So I'm really not sure about the relative importance of these various factors.

[Determinant]

Immigration is not internal migration, and Canada doesn't have large enough immigration to dramatically skew our demographic profile. The fact that there are more men in one area is compensated by there being less men in another area. A country is a closed system, except for migration, which as I said isn't large enough to skew results. 250,000 people a year in a population of 35 million won't change

A baby boom is also irrelvant because it results in a natural sex ratio anyway. It's deaths that matter.

On a national level, health factors are dramatically more important than migration in determining the sex ratio at a given time.

[The Keystone Garter]

"The latest Census release provides us with a new and vital insight into Canadian demographics: Petawawa, Ontario is the best place in Canada to meet a man."

My friend used to give girls he knew in Petawawa rides to the middle of nowhere and then pick them up hrs later.

[Nick Rowe]

I was surprised that the male/female dispersion wasn't greater. Anecdotal stuff about "shortages of eligible men/women around here" suggested bigger dispersion.

Maybe using the 15-64 age range makes the dispersion slightly less than (say) a 20-64 age range, since 15 and 16 year olds don't usually leave home, so you would get equal numbers of each. But that can't change the percentages that much.

My hunch is that mobility is highest for people in their late teens and early twenties, and so the age range at which sex dispersion would be greatest would be at the point where mobility ends, maybe around age 30? (Ignoring old age, of course, with men still dying younger).

Or maybe, even small differences in numbers make for bigger differences in unattached numbers, once people start to pair off (given monogamy).

[K]

Nick: "I was surprised that the male/female dispersion wasn't greater."

(55.5-44.5)/44.5 = 25% more men than women in Petawawa. Then removing all the married ones, sounds pretty sucky for Petawawa Man.

[Nick Rowe]

K: Hmmm. Yes, it does look a lot worse when you do some basic algebra. Funny how that happens!

[Frances Woolley]

Nick - yup, the 15-64 age range is pretty limiting, but the census data released only seemed to provide data on under 15s, 15-64s, 65+ and 80+.

Keystone Garter: ?

K: that kind of calculation is pretty familiar to people looking at university students. When universities are 60% female, that means the female/male ratio is .6/.4 or 1.5 to one.

[Nick Rowe]

I had to read Keystone Garter's comment 3 times before I figured it out! He's saying (I'm pretty sure) that Petawawa men are willing to act as unpaid taxi drivers for women, just to get some company. Not that they kick the women out of the car in the middle of nowhere and leave them there for hours!

[The Keystone Garter]

Some women like Base guys is all I'm saying. I let a girl sleep in my bed but had no chance with her as she was a Base girl. Cold Lake also a Base.
Someone kept insisting I sleep with an elderly woman who was about to die. So small white towns are also overweighted women. If it is obvious, might want to add why there is a ratio difference lest your migrant gets left out in the cold.

[Shangwen]

Nick: I have a more time-efficient multiplier for reading baffling/creepy comments.

Demographic change is endlessly fascinating. The Globe's article on Airdrie, AB, a town of 45,000 with no hospital, is both amazing but also a little bracing. While we have good reason to be concerned about the long-term, short-term shifts can be equally difficult for public services.

[Bob Smith]

"shortages of eligible men/women around here"

Note the key qualifier: "eligible". I don't know, but I suspect for most woman, the "eligibility" requirement goes beyong a Y chromosome (then again, my wife married me... maybe I don't want to go there).

In terms of the increase in the number of men, I might suggest two possible explanation. One, if there's been a bit of a baby boom, that might be a contributing factor, since babies are statistically more likely to be boys (nature's way of correcting for the fact that males are more likely to die young). The number is small (there are generally 105 boys born for every 100 woman, at least in societies that don't practice gender based abortion), but then again we're talking about a 0.08% change.

Other than that, could it be that woman have embraced the many dumb things that used to be the sole (or at least, dominant) preserve of the males of the species, which led to them getting killed at a faster clip? The gender gaps for doing things like smoking, drinking, climbing Mount Everest (to name a few) seems to be declining over time. Not sure that's neccesarily a good thing.

[Frances Woolley]

Bob, yup, I think it's both of those things (shrinking male/female gap in life expectancy plus blip up in the birth rate), plus the flow of immigrants isn't 50/50 male/female (don't recall the exact #s, and don't have time to look right now).

[Wendy]

I've been looking at Calgary demographics and noticed that in the 25-34 age bracket for Calgary there are more women than men (slightly). Is this because the guys are in Fort Mac? or are they balancing out the men 35-44 (in which age bracket there are slightly more men).

I also noticed that in Calgary there are more toddlers (ages 0-4) than boomers 55-59 or 60-64.

[Determinant]

That was noted in the national news yesterday. For the first time in five decades, the fertility ratio of Canadian women, the average number of births per mother, has increased.

[Frances Woolley]

Wendy, in the lower mainland, despite the explosion of people with strollers on the Skytrain, it still seems that a lot of young families with children move out to places like Abbotsford and Chilliwack, where they aren't counted towards the Vancouver census numbers. I suspect that in Calgary and Edmonton, those young families with kids are still inside the city limits, and this is impacting the age/sex composition of the cities.

I don't know about the 25-34 age bracket - guys in Fort Mac, or just on the farm, would do it. Universities are become female-dominated places, and this probably impacts numbers a little bit too, though I'd think it wouldn't affect 25-34 that much.

[Frances Woolley]

Sorry, I meant, explosion in the number of people with stroller.

[Determinant]

I don't know about the 25-34 age bracket - guys in Fort Mac, or just on the farm, would do it. Universities are become female-dominated places, and this probably impacts numbers a little bit too, though I'd think it wouldn't affect 25-34 that much.

But not Faculties of Engineering, which are still male-dominated despite everyone's best efforts. Old joke: What do Engineers use for birth control? Their personalities.

Nursing Faculties are still strongly female dominated.

[J.V. Dubois]

Determinant: about higher birth rates, something similar is also happening in some parts of Europe. It may be different in Canada, but the delayed maternity is the reason why this is happening in my country. The shift in the time when women usually gave birth changed from 18-28 years closer to 28-38 years. This change in behavior somewhat overstated the birth rate problem in the past and it also created a temporary blip in birth rates during recent years. But the underlying problem of natural decline is still there.

[Jacques René Giguère]

J.V. Dubois: But in most developped countries, falling birtrate is accompanied by increasing level of education. Same stock of human capital, less resources needed. Like armies replacing lot of conscripts needing lot of supplies by higly-trained Special Forces...