Male To Female Ratio By State

The national sex ratio sits at 0.978 — meaning roughly 98 men for every 100 women across the United States. But that average masks a sharp geographic divide. Only 11 of 50 states have more men than women, and all 11 are west of the Mississippi. The remaining 39 states skew female, with the strongest imbalances concentrated in the Deep South and along the Eastern Seaboard. The gap between the most male-heavy state (Alaska, 1.09) and the most female-heavy (Alabama and Delaware, both 0.94) works out to roughly 16 extra men per 100 women — a difference driven by industry, age demographics, and incarceration patterns rather than birth rates.

Cross-referencing the sex ratio with state population totals reveals a structural imbalance: the 10 most male-heavy states contain just 20.6 million residents combined, while the 10 most female-heavy states hold 71.9 million. The "typical American" lives in a female-majority state.

X-axis: Sex Ratio (males per female); Y-axis: State Population. Male-surplus states cluster uniformly below 6 million residents, while every state above 10 million skews female — confirming that population scale correlates with female majority.

The top three states share a single structural trait: their economies depend on industries where men hold 85% or more of the workforce. Alaska's ratio of 1.09 — the highest in the nation by a wide margin — reflects an economy built on oil, fishing, and military installations where 87–91% of workers are male. The imbalance is concentrated in the North Slope and the Aleutians, where extraction sites operate; urban Anchorage and Juneau are closer to parity.

North Dakota (1.05) saw its ratio spike during the Bakken shale boom starting in 2007. Pew Research found that men accounted for two-thirds of the state's 12% population growth from 2009 to 2013, with young men in their 20s composing 29% of the influx. Wyoming (1.04) follows the same pattern through coal, natural gas, and trona mining. The resource-extraction pipeline is self-reinforcing: male-dominated workforces attract more male workers, while limited service-sector and university infrastructure gives fewer reasons for women to relocate.

Seven states cluster at or below a 0.94 ratio — New York, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Maryland, Mississippi, Delaware, and Alabama. The shared structural drivers are aging populations (women outlive men by ~5 years nationally), concentration of healthcare and education employment, and disproportionate male incarceration. In the Deep South specifically, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana all fall in the bottom quartile, where these three forces compound simultaneously.

The most counterintuitive finding in this dataset is that Texas (0.99) and California (0.99) — two states dominated by male-heavy industries like oil, agriculture, and tech — still skew slightly female. Scale is the explanation: once a state exceeds roughly 7–8 million residents, its economy diversifies enough that no single industry can tilt the overall ratio. Texas has 31.9 million people; even the entire Permian Basin oil workforce cannot offset a healthcare system employing 1.7 million workers, the majority of them women. The same logic applies to California, where Silicon Valley's male tech workforce is drowned out by the state's 4 million healthcare and education workers.

This is why the sex ratio correlates weakly but negatively with population (r = −0.21): male-surplus conditions require a small enough economy for one dominant industry to move the needle. Every state above 10 million residents in this dataset is female-majority.