Men wanted…………………….!

A report by leading demographer Bernard Salt in The Australian says that women sick Australia’s man drought need to take a more global perspective

He says, let’s recap the really important pieces of information yielded thus far by the 2006 census. First there was the Bridget Jones Index showing that Roxby Downs has the highest ratio of 30-something men to 30-something women in Australia. Then there was the Bachelor Barometer, confirming that Singleton is the place to be for an abundance of single young men.

This was followed by an especially designed boomer version of the bachelor hotspot, which identified Gladstone as the place to be for access to a large pool of single 50-something men.

But what does a woman do if she’s disinclined to live in places like Roxby Downs, Singleton and Gladstone?

The answer is that she can always look overseas. Where in the world are the best odds of finding a single young male, and how does Australia compare in this global manhunt?

I have accessed UN demographic data and examined the gender balance in the 30-something age group in more than 200 countries.

The reason I have focused on this age group is that it is in this decade that women become most concerned about partnering, as fertility begins to decline.

There is another reason: the ratio of males to females worldwide drops in this decade.

Globally there are 105 males born for every 100 females. If someone in your office is pregnant and you are betting on the gender, always bet on the boy because more are born.

Mother Nature oversupplies boys at birth for two possible reasons. Historically, males tend to be greater risk-takers and so to ensure that an ample supply of males makes it through to reproduction it is necessary to oversupply their numbers at birth.

The other reason is biological. If there are more males than females, men have to compete with each other to pass on their genes. As a consequence only the strongest and the fittest – or perhaps in modern parlance, the richest – get to reproduce.

In Armenia, China and Georgia, boys at birth outnumber girls by 10 per cent, or five percentage points above the apparent natural ratio. For some odd reason the boy-girl ratio at birth is exactly even in Angola. The Australian ratio is 105 baby boys for every 100 baby girls.

The oversupply of men relative to women is a feature of the decade beyond puberty. Teenage women and women in their 20s worldwide are well used to there being many suitors for their affections. However, by 30-39 the global oversupply of men is whittled down to just 103 males per 100 females.

In Australia, by this decade the ratio flips entirely to just 96 males for every 100 females. However, in some nations – such as Lesotho, Macau, Hong Kong and Mozambique – there are at least 20 per cent more females than males in this age group.

At the global level, war and presumably an inherently riskier lifestyle kills off men at a faster rate than women up to the age of 30. In addition, there is the fact that men in their 30s are more inclined than women to pursue economic migration.

In many nations where the 30-something man drought is apparent, the reason for the absence of men is not so much mortality as migration. Herein lies the reason for the man drought in Australia and elsewhere. A combination of male mortality and male migration is creating a gender imbalance at the national level.

Added to this is the fact that in a country as large as Australia it is possible for substantial areas of gender imbalance to arise.

Young women no longer sit around in country towns waiting to marry the boy next door. They are up and off to the city at the first opportunity to pursue job opportunities and further education. Many go straight to lifestyle communities on the beach.

The same thing happens at the global level.

Aspirational men emigrate from small nations to places of perceived economic opportunity. Young men, in particular, leave countries such as Puerto Rico and Mexico and go to the US.

Young men also leave countries such as New Zealand and Australia for places like the United Arab Emirates.

There are 12,000 Australians living in the UAE’s Dubai, mostly men aged 25-34.

For single women, this means the man drought is very real in the 30-something and older age groups in Australia.

The reason is the international flow of labour and the migratory instinct of men, and especially of men living in what Generation Y perceive to be remote places such as New Zealand and Australia.

As a consequence, there are global hotspots where young men outnumber young women. The nation with the highest ratio of men to women in the 30-something age group is theUAE.

There are more than three males for every female in this age group there. The oversupply of men in places such as Dubai is a result of the inflow of skilled and unskilled labour. Other Middle East communities that have more than two men per woman in this age group are Qatar and Kuwait.

Beyond the Islamic world, there are far more men than women aged 30-something in India, Germany, Finland and Greece.

These are not countries that have an inordinate oversupply of boys at birth, so the explanation for the gender imbalance in favour of men aged 30-something must be either the emigration of young women or the immigration of young men.

Either way, these nations and much of the Middle East are, statistically at least, the best places on the planet to find a young man.

Perhaps a trendy travel agency might like to set up a new travel itinerary pitched at 30-something single Australian and New Zealand women in search of a partner: New Delhi, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Athens and Dubai.

Even within nations, the male-female odds are better in some areas than others.

In the US, there are 10 per cent more men than women aged 30-something in the frontier states of Colorado (possibly skiing), Nevada and Arizona. But there are more women than men aged 30-something in places such as New Zealand, Mexico and Australia.

In the US, there are more women than men in Maryland, Mississippi and New York. It would seem that the girls of Sex and the City really have something to whinge about after all.

The gender balance issue was not especially relevant a generation ago. There was far less scope at an international level for economic migration by young men.

There was also less inclination for women to leave remote communities in countries such as Australia and the US for large cities.

International labour flows in the 21st century are likely to exacerbate the man drought.

How healthy is it for a community such as Dubai to have a male-to-female ratio of three to one in the 30-something age group? Not even Australia’s top bachelor hotspot, Singleton, can match those odds.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner and can be contacted at [email protected]

Report by The Mole from The Australian