Sunday, June 20, 2010

Just how unlikely?

My love of wrestling is baffling to most people.

In my blog tagline posits that I am an unlikely wrestling fan. Let me unpack that. First: I am female. Most wrestling fans are male. Second: I am 28, and I never watched wrestling prior to 2006. Third and beyond: I am a Mensa member. I am a feminist. I have a household income well above the national average. I am a New Englander.

Now this all doesn't make me perfectly unique. Many people join me in any one category, and probably quite a few in all. How many? Let's try it out.

Let's say there are about 15,000,000 people who live in New England. Cut it in half to get just the women....7,500,000. Mensa members must be in the top 2% of the population for IQ, so let's get down to 150,000 or so. According to the best stat I could find, around 29% of women consider themselves feminists, so we're down to 45,000. I am 28, and according to the best population tree I could find, 25-29 year olds make up about 3% of the population, leaving 1,350 of us. At the height of wrestling in 1999, 16% of white Americans claimed to be wrestling fans. Taking that number leaves us with 216 folks like me. Take my household income as higher than average leaves 100 or so of us. Factor in the late start to fandom, and you're down even lower. Even if you stick with the 100 (which I will to make up for assuming that Mensa members make evenly distributed salaries or that self defined feminist are evenly distributed among age ranges....though I also didn't even touch the "are the genders equally represented in high IQ societies" question). Still, that puts me in a very select group, approximately 0.0007% of the New England population, even less country-wide.

All in all, you're pretty lucky to be reading this.

1 comment:

  1. Dang. If you were left handed you would be a statistical impossibility. Or at least more than 3 standard deviations from the norm.

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