I love Mark Thoma's description of this graphic showing the gender breakdown of singles across the nation as "like a 7th grade dance with the boys huddled together on one side of the room, the girls on the other with a few mixtures scattered about." For whatever reason, single males seem clustered on the West Coast, while the East Coast -- particularly New York -- has an excess of female singles. On the other hand, I think the graph overstates itself, as we're dealing, even in most of the big dots (save NY), with a 40,000 person imbalance one way or the other. That's just not that large on the scale of a population. Moreover, the data lacks any obvious fine-tuning. If the East Coast is notably heavy on retirees, it'll end up with more single women simply because women live longer than men. If the data is constrained by age, though, you're probably seeing an imbalance in industries -- various professions in the West attract men (software design, the military) while many in the East are heavier on women. I can't figure out offhand what industries on the East would be attracting women and not men, though.
