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One observation that I have is that there seem to be more attached girls than attached guys around.
Intuitively, this would seem not to make sense, just like the fact that men report more sexual partners on average than women (to which the answer is that both are lying). Surely for every attached girl there is an attached guy, so there should be a rough balance (the men can't all be cheating).
However, the seeming contradiction made more sense when I reflected that this observation was borne out of personal observation, which is naturally centred around (even if not limited to) my age band.
For more clarity, I decided to look up some statistics. The first I dug out was the Population Age Pyramid:
As of 2009, in the age group 0-19 there're more girls than guys, but in the one from 20-29 there're more guys than girls.
There wasn't enough granularity to be too sure, and I could only get so far putting a ruler to my screen, so I dug further.
I had an amusing romp around the MCYS website. For example, did you know that we measure our commitment against "Sex Stereotyping" under 1995's Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action under the "No. of cases prosecuted under the Undesirable Publications Act"? This is the act that forbids obscene material in Singapore. The only possible reference to "Sex Stereotyping" is a section on any publication that "represents, directly or indirectly, that members of any particular community or group are inherently inferior to other members of the public or of any other community or group".
Another interesting tidbit is that Singapore's sex ratio (of men to women) has been falling since Independence:
This is despite the sex ratio at birth having been between 106.4 and 109.4 between 1982 and 1993, and currently being 107.77 and 1.08 from 2003-9.
Possibly - just possibly - this has something to do with Slavery.
In any case, for a more detailed breakdown by age group and gender, I turned to the results of the 2000 census (adding a column for sex ratio for clarity).
Very naively projecting the figures by 10 years (i.e. we assume that the sex ratio for the 0-4 age group in 2000 will be the sex ratio for the 10-14 age group in 2010), we can see that until you hit the age band of 30-34, there're more men than women in each age band. Which would explain my observation.
(I shall try to repeat this simple exercise once the 2010 census's results are out to confirm this finding)
Reinforcing this effect is how men go for younger women (and women go for older men). So what is probably the case is that as you go up the age strata, there're more attached girls than guys - until you hit the age stratum of the mid-30s. After the girls expire there're many more attached guys than girls in each individual stratum.
Of course, there're connections here with marriage broken down by age and gender, but I will (may) deal with that in a blog post in the future (near, far or otherwise). Suffice it to say that preliminary analysis of Marriage statistics has shown that the Christmas Cake Theory ("Stale after the 25th") does not apply in Singapore.
