Divergence in U.S. Sex Ratios by County, 1820–2010

http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/sex-ratios/

by jhnewman • 11 years ago

18 18 11 years ago

kens• 11 years ago

One scary sentence from the linked blog post: "Since the 1990s, the map shows isolated, lightly populated counties with heavily male populations: those are the counties with prisons."

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

Prisoners are included within normal population figures? Interesting.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Prisoners are people.

Prisoners live in a geographical location.

Seems kind of obvious that prisoners living within the bounds of a geographic area would be included in counts of people living in that geographic area.

jhnewman• 11 years ago

It's something of a controversy about whether the Census should count prisoners as living in the place where they are imprisoned or in the place where they formerly lived. The policy of counting them as living in the place where they are imprisoned diverts federal and state monies away from the places that they came from.

ealfert• 11 years ago

The 2010 data shows Pulaski Country, Georgia to have a high women population. This is also due to prison population since there is a women's prison there.

peapicker• 11 years ago

I imagine northern Alaska is predominately male still due to the 'wild frontier hard life' aspects more than a prison in the current data, as the probably exception to this analysis.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

That presumably is due to the oil extraction going on up there.

dmckeon• 11 years ago

Some heavily male counties in some decades may be military bases - look for Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and Cannon AFB in Clovis, New Mexico.

ccvannorman• 11 years ago

National flip from predominantly male to female happened around 1950, just after WW2.

ginko• 11 years ago

It was a combination of WW2 and penicillin severely reducing the mortality rate of childbirth.

joe_the_user2• 11 years ago

Women live longer than men.

I wonder how of the divergences not explained by prisons are explained by the age of the population.

dajohnson89• 11 years ago

Also worth considering, is whether men are more likely to emigrate than women.

joe_the_user2• 11 years ago

Indeed,

The graph is almost an essay in "how little raw data can tell you". Are the areas of more women from emigration, age, areas from which many men have been taken to prison, something else?

_random_• 11 years ago

My guess: men are likely to emigrate to any place with decent jobs (e.g. some oil state), women are probably likely to emigrate to a sex-and-the-city states.

afarrell• 11 years ago

The broad swath of yellow across the south in 1870 is...kinda chilling.

Divergence in U.S. Sex Ratios by County, 1820–2010

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