Before I dropped out of the University of Waterloo, I took a deviant sociology course with a prof who assigned us his Ph.D. thesis as the primary course reading: the results of a long study into what the hookers and hustlers and other lowlifes do in seedy bars. The study consisted of…hanging out at seedy bars. Nice work if you can get it.
Now, Peter of SemiSober.com has done one better: for his final project in a Stanford University statistics class, he's done an analysis of the odds of picking up women in Silicon Valley bars — well, actually of the relative ratios of men and women in bars in the notoriously male tech area — whose methodology consisted of…hanging out in bars. Nice work, etc.
Although ratios varied widely from one bar to the other, I found that on average, in the cities of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Mountain View, the male to female ratio was about 5 to 3. More precisely, I found that the ratio was about 62% men to 38% women (95% confidence interval for men = [59.46%, 64.54%]). These ratios differed widely depending on the type of bar that was surveyed, and were sometimes as high as 3-to-1.
(via EvHead)
