There's been some talk recently about how city X is a dating paradise for gender Y and so on so I decided to collect some data that could support / refute such claims. The first thing that leapt to mind was to compare the relative number of men-seeking-women (m4w) to women-seeking-men (w4m) personals posted on the popular craigslist.org discussion site. I wrote a little script that would count the number of personals of each type, for each city, over the last seven days. Without further comment, let's look at the data:
City Ratio of m4w/w4m posts for the week 12/13 to 12/20
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
washingtondc 2.54 (m4w = 558 / w4m = 220)
atlanta 2.54 (m4w = 61 / w4m = 24)
austin 2.55 (m4w = 84 / w4m = 33)
lasvegas 2.88 (m4w = 49 / w4m = 17)
philadelphia 3.16 (m4w = 196 / w4m = 62)
boston 3.68 (m4w = 1320 / w4m = 359)
sfo 3.70 (m4w = 3388 / w4m = 915)
portland 3.83 (m4w = 287 / w4m = 75)
denver 3.85 (m4w = 104 / w4m = 27)
chicago 3.93 (m4w = 499 / w4m = 127)
seattle 3.94 (m4w = 355 / w4m = 90)
nyc 4.05 (m4w = 3802 / w4m = 938)
orangecounty 4.35 (m4w = 74 / w4m = 17)
miami 4.88 (m4w = 127 / w4m = 26)
sandiego 5.13 (m4w = 390 / w4m = 76)
losangeles 5.94 (m4w = 2079 / w4m = 350)
Well there you have it. L.A. is the place to be if you are a straight woman looking for love on-line, and D.C. takes the crown as straight-male internet dating mecca (with a mere 2.5 boys for every girl).
The source code for the script used to collect this data can be downloaded here. Cities that that had less than 50 m4w posts in the last week are not listed since I consider that too little data to be meaningful. It's too bad no Canadian cities made the cut, and I didn't even check international ones -- CL just isn't as popular outside of the USA. This study is hardly scientific -- Relocate based on these results at your own risk.
