Facebook’s ad tool gives you demographic counts. Here are the number of people 18+ in Singapore– 1.8 million:
We’ve left the setting on both genders and all relationship statuses.
Now we look at just the females. There are 903,840 of them, which is about half the population.
Now let’s look at females who are seeking males– there are only 53,300 of them.
Now what one might erroneously conclude is that the difference (903,840 minus 53,300) are women seeking women. Thus, 850,540 of these 903,840 are lesbians.
However, not everyone states their sexual preference. So here are the females seeking females. There are 102,980 of them, which is nearly double the number of females seeking males!
I ran the stats twice to make sure– and sure enough, these numbers check out. By the way, if you add up the number of women who prefer either males or females, then you have a total of 156,280, which is only a sixth of the female population of about 900,000. Thus, 5/6ths of people aren’t declaring their sexual preference.
Why? I believe that the gay people don’t want to be obstracized in certain countries, while the heterosexual folks are perhaps tired of being bombarded by dating ads. But there could be also a fraction of people who are bisexual, asexual or have other preferences.
Reminds of a friend who was filling out a form– and in the section marked sex, he said, “Yes, please!”
Either your assumption is correct or facebook is full of spam accounts.
Hi Thomas,
It’s actually neither– it’s that there are cultural differences in what “seeking friends” and other terms means. This is what happens when there is slang for “seeing someone”, “sleeping last night” and other terms– so when you overlay one culture’s meaning on another, you get confusion and perhaps humor. My post here was a mock serious tone, but clearly, it’s not serious. There are not likely to be a majority of lesbians in Singapore, not is the data necessarily “bad”!
Excellent cultural lesson! I wouldn’t have thought of that explanation, but since you mentioned it, it makes perfect sense. How does it look in other asian countries that have large facebook populations?
I also think this article is very good. I like Singapore, You can also visit here if you want to get deep in Singapore.
Hahaha.. great post… see how one silly mistake could lead to a nation’s shame … very funny post. you must be a facebook expert… how did you get all of this info..
Hi Adam– sorry for the late reply.
This info came from massive trial and error, plus some help from Facebook, so hopefully you can save some money from my experience!
Lol, I don’t know – it could be a typo, but if not then that instantly puts Singapore at the top of my list for future travel destinations!