ShareThisSingle men, listen up: Sacramento, Calif., is the only metropolitan area on the West Coast where there are more single women than men.
What has the region's singles scene so lopsided are the 20,000 more single women than single men over age 34, according U.S. census data from 2006.
The statistic stumped area professors, who couldn't offer a definitive explanation for why Sacramento attracts older women.
One thing, however, is certain: Many of those women are out dining, dating and pursuing hobbies.
"I go out almost every night," said Sacramento resident Christina Ragsdale, a bubbly, single 53-year-old. "You don't have to sit at home if you don't want to."
In his book "Who's Your City?," University of Toronto professor Richard Florida mapped out the ratio of single men to women ages 20 to 64 in urban areas across the United States. The resulting visual showed an astonishing pattern: The East Coast is a magnet for single women, while every metropolitan area west of Denver has a significantly higher proportion of single men.
Except Sacramento.
Maybe it's because Sacramento has a higher proportion of government employees who are more likely to be female, said Jacqueline Carrigan, an associate sociology professor at California State University, Sacramento.
"You get less age discrimination in hiring as well. So when you get those two factors I would guess it's a good market situation for older women," said Rachel August, another CSUS professor who studies working women.
Anybody out and about on a weekend evening can see the difference. One Sacramento club, Mix Downtown, has set itself up to appeal to women over 30.
The club opened in December 2008, because owner Mason Wong felt there was no place for the over-30 crowd. Mix Downtown, he said, is for women who want to party but don't want to be in a mosh pit with the barely legal crowd.
Mix Downtown attracts so many younger men that some of them have nicknamed it "the cougar's den." Not "cougar" as in panther, but as in today's popular moniker for older women who date younger men.
Women weren't always so self-assured, said Valerie Gibson, author of "Cougar, A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men." She said it's because of the economic independence women have achieved in recent years.
"Once they had their own money they turned around and became single and said, 'I want it to go my way now,' " Gibson said. "And they're taking control of their sexual life, which was unheard of before."
Women on average now spend more years of their adult lives being single than married, said Bella DePaulo, author of "Singled Out," a book that argues that there's a cultural bias against singles.
DePaulo said she has evidence single women are happier.
"I have found that no group shows lower levels of loneliness than single older women," she said.
(E-mail Anna Tong at atong(at)sacbee.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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