Statistics of a lonely heart

May 6th, 2008

I was browsing idly through the lonely hearts column on my daily commute yesterday, when I stumbled across an acronym I’d never seen before: OHAC. One Hot Ass Chick? Over the Hill And Crumbling? Obama, Hillary and Colbert? Once at work, a quick Google search revealed all: Own House And Car. Damn, I thought, now that’s materialistic.

This made me think, what do women really want? When faced with writing up an order in twenty words, what do they ask for? Love? Companionship? A man with his own house and car? And similarly, do men in the classified ads really fit the stereotype of ageing divorcee looking for a trophy girlfriend to spend their money on? There’s only one way to find out - with MATHS!

For this investigation my source material was a copy of the London Paper, mostly because it’s free and gets handed to me by a nice man outside Piccadilly Tube station. I drew up a score sheet that awarded a point every time a classified ad mentioned a key word or phrase. The categories are:

• Age
• Looks
• Wealth
• Personality
• Race
• Religion
• Location
• Family

So asking for a man “35-40″ will score one point. Asking for a women who is “fun-loving, charismatic and full of life” will score three points. “OHAC” scores a point for Wealth, as does asking for a “professional”. One hour of counting later, and the results are in.

I dropped religion, location and family from the final analysis because only very few people scored points in these categories. If I had a bigger sample, I might include them. There were 38 ads from women, and 32 ads from men. Overall, women were pretty verbose, scoring 126 points in total. Men tended to be more succinct, scoring only 60 points - less than half as much. Guess they’re not too fussy. Without further ado, here is the breakdown. The percentages refer to how much of the total demands an individual category constituted.

Women
Looks 15%
Age 19%
Wealth 13%
Personality 43%
Race 10%

Men
Looks 28%
Age 18%
Wealth 2%
Personality 45%
Race 7%

Great Scott! It appears that men have trumped women in seeking a partner with a personality (well, OK, the margin is probably insignificant). Men have also been more concerned with looks than the women - even when you group ‘race’ and ‘looks’ (which I felt maybe I should have done), men asked for it 35% of the time where as women only 25%. The biggest discrepancy between the two? Women said they wanted someone wealthy 13% of the time - while only one man in the 32 sampled thought it important enough to mention. Concrete, indisputable evidence that all women are gold-digging hootchies! Seriously though - this would be a fun project to apply in different countries, just to see if there were any differences. I’m sure some clever reader out there could rig together a piece of code that would do it automatically.

My next piece of classified ads stats? I’m going to look at how people describe themselves, and see if the sexes have really cottoned on to what eachother want.

Entry Filed under: General

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