They say 70% of children is born to single mothers in Iceland. The stats they reference says 70% is born outside of a marriage. That’s just because most couples in Nordic countries do not marry not because the mother is single. If they get that wrong what else did they get wrong.

I am probably missing something obvious, but how can the number of single women increase 50% but single men only raise 15%? Unless there is a large population of lesbian women who suddenly decided to stop dating, I would imagine the number of single men and single women would track each other (roughly, with differences being accounted for by same-sex couples, gender distribution changes, and death rates.)

Unless this is just a population boom among women?

There was already lots of single men living there, so there wasn't as much opportunity for their numbers to go up. For single women to afford to live in the same neighbourhood, they have to be part of the professional class, and the number of professional women has gone up quite a bit over time.

Traditionally in many cultures, single adult men live alone but single adult women live with their families. Nowadays, women are moving out and living on their own as adults.

I wonder if there’s also a change in the number of women seeking apartments entirely on their own instead of living with roommates - in the first half of the 20th C in the west, single adult women who moved out of their parents’ homes would often take rooms in boarding houses run by matrons, rather than getting their own apartments. My understanding is that this would be considered both safer and more proper.

It may also have to do with what neighborhoods each gender chooses. Women tend to have a stronger preference for “safer” neighborhoods; men on average are both more risk tolerant and more confident in their ability to defend themselves against assaults. So women may choose neighborhoods that have already gentrified or begun to, while men may be more comfortable pursuing the lower rents in neighborhoods that haven’t yet.

Ah, that makes sense... they mean 'single' as in living alone, not just their relationship status.

Another obvious option is men dating multiple women.

The single men could be living in a different neighborhood than the single women.

They're looking at geographically limited area, so there's no reason to expect a balanced gender ratio because men and women can move in or out at different rates. I'm guessing that previously a lot of single men moved there for economic opportunity but now both single men and single women are moving there for economic opportunity.

It's pretty simple incel theory, really. (Despite the negative connotations of the word "incel", I'm actually supporting your comment.)

"More young men than young women have indeed been coming to Europe. Of the 1.2m asylum applicants in the last 12 months of available data, 73% were men, up from 66% in 2012. Those men skew increasingly young: according to Eurostat, the proportion of male asylum claimants who were 18- to 34-year-olds was 40% in October 2015 (the latest available data), up from 35% in 2012. Males between 14 and 17 years old accounted for 11% of all asylum-seekers, up from 5% in 2012."

https://www.economist.com/europe/2016/01/16/oh-boy

Is this not common knowledge?

I've in the past been downvoted for suggesting that counting the number of attractive women you see walking down the street would give you the best single metric for measuring the vibrancy of a neighbourhood. Now that I've got some data to back up the claim, I would probably still get downvoted for suggesting as much.

Please don't break the site guidelines, which ask you not to go on about downvoting. Especially please don't do downvote-baiting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ok. FYI the site guidelines say nothing about downvotes. I had never heard the term 'downvote-baiting' before, and when I looked it up, the top result was you in some other thread on HN.

The guidelines might might specifically forbid talking about downvotes, but they do forbid talking about votes in general.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments.

As Buge pointed out, we generalized it. Older versions of the guidelines contained those rules more specifically—see the bottom of https://web.archive.org/web/20120321171757/http://ycombinato....

Since there were other ways users were taking threads off topic by complaining about voting, we decided to just make it shorter and ask not to do any of that.

The article doesn't really say anything about attractiveness. Maybe you should adjust your metric to single-looking working age women.

What—other than not wearing a wedding ring—makes a woman “single-looking”?

Not walking next to a man about her age or kids.