The Hanover Collaboration

You see statistics like these all the time. The number of opposite-sex partners for men and women being drastically different. This particular work uses the median but often you hear it as the mean.

Can anyone point out the problem?

Hookups count for both teams, there are the same number of boys as girls. The means should be equal. If these variables behaved, the medians would be equal too.

Let’s pretend that the source of this isn’t self-reporting.

This suggests that the distribution of hookups for girls is substantially more skewed than that of boys. In the case of the mean, there must be a very small number of girls nearly single-handedly holding the true mean away from the estimated mean. Let’s call them sluts, for lack of a better term. In the case of median, you don’t really know except that there are many more hook-ups for the girls above the median than the boys above the median.

On the other team, I know some of you might think of yourselves as “playas”. I’ve got news for you. You are coming nowhere near the sort of numbers the sluts are putting up. You probably have no game at all. You probably just have a knack for finding the sluts.

Look at this one. Over 20% of men have had more than 15 partners while only less than 10% of women have had so many. At some point those curves need to cross and when they do, the sluts will have a lot of ground to make up.

The need to make up all the ground lost by the other >90% of “good girls”. Just to make up the ground lost in the 9th decile they have to have at least 15 additioanl partners each, plus whatever they boys in the 10th decile are putting out, plus all the ground lost by everyone else. It’s got to be over 70 partners. So when it said that only 10% of women have had more than 15 partners, it was a pretty glaring omittion that they averaged 70 partners apiece. Good scientists would have noted that. The only explaination is that those datapoints just didn’t show up.

What was ‘n’? 61,147! If you put them far enough into the tails to be missed by a survey that large, there are just too few of them. They would have to have a hundreds of thousands of partners each. There just isn’t enough time in the day for that, is there?

Here’s an alternative explaination, the missing hookups are by men younger than 44 and women older than 44. I could imagine that I guess with all those cougars on the prowl.