Head West, Young Woman

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 9, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Silicon Valley well may become a favorite destination of America's young single women. New Census data show that California's Santa Clara County -- the home of so many software-engineering and high-tech firms -- happens to be one of the very few places in the United States that has more single men than single women.

Recent Census data show a plethora of 5,400 young unattached males in the area. This disproportionate number of guys in Santa Clara County was noted in an article in the San Jose Mercury News and cited in a dispatch from Reuters. Second in the number of free-floating males in the United States is Anchorage, Alaska, where authorities have identified about 3,300 single dudes.

Alas, however, the surplus of guys in Silicon Valley and Anchorage does little to address the glut of single gals in major metropolitan areas such as New York City (where the glut of single women is a whopping 537,311) or Los Angeles (where single women outnumber single men by 127,087).

But the Mercury News report did put a good spin on the surplus of males in Silicon Valley: "And these men are not your beer-guzzling, belching variety," it said, pointing out that many of them, if not most, have six-figure incomes and spend an awful lot of their time in the office.

Moreover, the report claimed, don't think of these guys as necessarily nerds or geeks. Many of them "look and behave nothing like the now-married Bill Gates, nerd supreme," the report concluded.