I'm not sure this data is very good. The Lexington Club is marked as having 7% more male checkins. I live right next door to the Lex, and it's a lesbian bar. Women outnumber men there at least 10-to-1.

We could've probably normalized this data better. The fact of the matter is that guys use foursquare nearly twice as much as girls do, so every venue will have dramatically more guy check-ins. A 7% male edge actually makes it one of the more female venues in the city.

Does foursquare publish male/female ratio user base stats? Based on the people I know, it seems like only males use apps like foursquare.

It may be the "early adopter" effect. In some cases, over 95% of (self-reporting) early adopters might be male. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/08/26/who-are-our-firef...

Anyway, here's one "female" who uses foursquare: http://twitter.com/#!/Snubs/status/26996595662 :-)

Now I'm confused. Your post implies that this is a raw excess (truly 7% more men than women, which is a relative excess of women compared to the citywide average of 2 male:1 female checkin), right? But shasha...sha's post indicates that you've actually already normalized, which would imply that this is actually 7% more men than average, which is already quite male (2 male per 1 female, per shasha...sha's post).

Which is correct? Or am I misinterpreting?

sorry, it is 7% higher than sf's average. this is probably a case of Foursquare's demographic being heavily male [and heavily straight??]

Gotcha. That clears it up; thanks.

Indeed. I noticed that Hooters (between Aquatic Park & Pier 39 in SF) had 27% more women.

The kind that accepts valid currency?

[Edit:

Since the HN crowd seems to like stories, here is one.

One night, back when I was single, a friend of mine and I rolled up to the Blue Room in D.C., decked out in white suits, smelling of day old booze and good times. We had fire in our belly, and barely a sandwich each, with some change burning holes in our pockets, ready to be thrown out like confetti, at any reasonably priced vice. Not to get religious, but we felt like Mickey Rourke and Billy Bob Thornton on a pilgrimage to Vegas, sans the cream '59 Impala, of course.

We walk in, more attitude than stature, two short Arab guys, escorted in by vintage house music, courtesy of the resident DJ, and shamelessly head to the first pair of women closest to the door. Quick awkward introductions, complete misunderstanding, wild gesturing and on to the next. As our luck has it, it was the same again, hand waving and written pleasantries ... damn. Third time is the charm, and what do you know, same thing again.

Fuck me dead! If it wasn't clear then, it is now; we hit The Room on deaf night! Everyone there belonged to an online dating community for deaf and mute people.

We came out and headed to 7/11, we each bought a pen and a notebook .. then back to the club. Ali, my friend, an SOB whom I am eager to meet in hell, said: deaf girls don't mind your thick accent :-]

Can we correctly label datasets please?

Visualization: Guy-to-girl ratio of foursquare/gowalla/facebook checkins for every bar, restaurant and other random location in SF/NYC frequented by foursquare/gowalla/facebook places users who remember to check in.

There are so many baises in there about the only solid fact you can take away from any of this is the relative popularity of locations with people who feel the need to broadcast their location.

I have to agree - the first thing I did on the site was to try to figure out where the data was from. But I can't find it anywhere (or even an "about" button that explains it). I assumed it was foursquare (same principle as wheretheladies.at, right?) but would have liked to see some background.

Not interested in Guy-to-girl ratio (I get the right ratio for me at every nerdish meetup I attend), but now I know there are 3 Whiskey Lounges in SF.

Is there a known guy/gal differential on Foursquare in these cities? If so, it might be nice to have the ability scale these scores to reflect that.

In other words, if 2/3 of SF's Foursquare users are female and 2/3 of a particular SF bar's Foursquare users are female:

1) It's true that the guy/gal ratio is 2:1, but

2) It's also true that there is no enrichment of women at this bar relative to the null expectation.

Edit: A collection of presumably neutral places (e.g., Bay Bridge) might help achieve such an estimate.

carbo,

all percentages shown are deviations from our calculated average per city, so there is an average of about 2 male checkins per 1 female checkin in SF. hope that clears it up a bit!

Do they normalize for the strong possibility that in general, guys check in more than girls? I'm assuming this is the case.

Or for that guys are more likely to want to check in and advertise that they're at a bar rather than a beauty shop, or even a coffeehouse? And vice versa?

we've thought about that a bit — it's probably harder to study that aspect [who wants to broadcast which where] but it is fascinating. strip clubs probably being way more male and the lex probably being way more female...

If the "Bay Bridge" is 24% more girls to guys, then I think there is a problem here with reporting information that's not statistically significant, because that seems very unlikely to me.

It's on the way back to downtown from the baseball park; SF has done well this year; SF girls like baseball.

I'm serious, actually. I was talking about this gender supply/demand issue in SF with my wife the other day and she observed that since baseball is a non-aggressive sport featuring high-status men, it serves a signalling function for single ladies that a bar doesn't.

Are you getting the Bay Bridge confused with the Third St Bridge?

No, there's a spot at Embarcadero & Harrison with an unobstructed view that seems to be very popular for taking photos with the bridge in the background, or just to stop and look.

After a game the trains are so crowded it's usually easier to walk the 1/2 mile back to Market street, so you've got several thousands going past there ~80 evenings a year. The last time we were there my wife referred to previous HN conversations about SF's social gender distribution and observed the abundance of single female giants fans.

Also, there's a Gordon Biersch right across the street, so that probably helps too...

So people check in "at the Bay Bridge" when they're just looking at it from a mile away?

As an East Bay resident I am offended.

(Late to the game, but I assume zain has been working to fix the kinks.)

Right now, the #1 highest female ratio is showing up as... 1887%. Without making a dumb joke about how your math may be off (duh), I will say this: from a business perspective, if you're going to err on one side or the other, it may as well be this one. Haha.

Not serious statistics, but very cool visual nonetheless.

Now, so long as everyone realizes the 'woman at the bar' scene in A Beautiful Mind isn't actual game theory, feel free to go nuts.

And if anyone genuinely IS interested in attempts by the dismal science to suck the soul out of romance, check out Gary Becker's 'A Theory of Marriage' papers.

Cool visuallization, but "Tropisue\u00f1o", really? ;-)

Tropisue\u00f1o has epic burritos. They haven't quite figured out how to get the right thing to the guy who ordered it. The burritos, though, whether or not you ordered them, make up for it.

visuallization with double L's, really? ;-) (why I can't edit my comment?)

So, very few bars in SF have more girls than guys. Sigh...

yet another site that fills the stereotype of "hyperlocal" and "location-based service". Both of these seem to be a euphemism for "NYC and San Francisco"

Probably because such apps are dramatically more useful/viable in highly dense cities

That's partially true, but I think also it's a sign that they're more interested in seducing investors than they are in making revenue.

If you could get a large enough population involved, you ought to be able to make this work in small towns in Ohio as well; however, you've got to produce a service that's got the wide appeal that Facebook does, not something that appeals primarily to 20-something technorati singles.

I'd like to see this same data, but normalized for the total number of checkins per group. Right now all it tells me is that of the people going to bars, guys are more likely to check in than girls, not necessarily that there are more guys at the bar.

There may be problems, as others have pointed out, but it still seems like a valuable tool for me. After all, I don't need it to be perfectly accurate.. just ballpark accurate in order to take advantage of it.

Please do Austin. :)

The filtering might be a bit off on that data set...Sephora is a beauty retail outlet, which hardly qualifies as a bar or restaurant and its the #1 place for women in NYC.

pick "nightlife" instead of the "shops" filter

How did the authors of the visualization get the checkin data for every venue in SF and NYC? I have been trying to do the same for another project, and it is not supported by foursquare..

On behalf of my single friends that I forwarded this to: "Thank you".

While I can't use this myself it's definitely helping a friend make plans for the near future.

To me the surprising thing is that ANY women check in to venues.... I can't think of any of my mates that do. But that might be a Manchester, UK thing.

is the male/female ratio of foursquare comparable to the society or did weeplaces at least try to interpolate them?

Pretty cool, but I'm a fan of the more macro version of the idea, as based on census data: http://www.xoxosoma.com/singles/ (also a really awesome design)

What was used to create the map visualizer? Any open source library in flash?

I understand that the statistics isn't completely accurate, but it still should give a rough idea. Think we could get the data graphed for more cities? (I just moved to Columbus, Ohio:)

Wow, this is one of those "why didn't I think of that" ideas. I could see this getting very popular over the next few weeks. Even if the data is not reliable, it's a very fun idea.

Totally agreed. I'm in NYC right now -- my first night of many, hopefully, as I'm here for the week interviewing -- and this is totally awesome. Going to have to play around with it, and maybe mine some data myself.

I'm going to need an iphone app for this, like right now

Can't see a thing. Flash?

AKA Map of gay/lesbian bars