Epistemic Status: non-serious
Whilst staying w my gf L, the two of us and a friend that visited had an interesting conversation on the neglected but tractable cause area of girl supply. The conversation went smth like this:
L: “we’re doing our part to increase the girl supply – what’re you doing?!”
X: “yeah I know, I’m sorry… I’m not personally contributing to it :/”
Me: “I think that’s fine, you could always offset by donating”
Thus, an idea was born1
We can approach the issue of girl supply from a couple different points.
Economically, we could look at supply-side and demand-side interventions. Some interventions will primarily strengthen the monopoly cis-women have over the girl supply, whilst others will increase the diversity through trans-women, enbies, and GNC folks. But we could also look at interventions that impact the dating-market more immediately, although here the question can become which dating-market to optimize for (🌸).
Economics
On the supply side we can encourage births (~0.47 girls/child baseline2) and either reduce sex-selective abortion in cultures with son preference or have them be towards girls, however, these take very long to take effect, also, this is only helpful for future generations, not for current ones due to the strong age gap.
Changes in immigration policy just does 1:1 trading between regions.
Life-extension research and cryo might help a bit, but women already consistently life ~5 years longer than men (OWiD)3
On the demand side we go into the dating territory quite inevitably. I guess we could invert the supply-side things and increase men emigration (which, again, still just shifts the problem elsewhere), and the sex-selective births thing also automatically applies here.
Monopoly-breaking measures
When increasing girl supply, the most immediate measure probably is MtF transitioning. For this, we could increase accessibility to good information, gender clinics, etc. and reduce stigmatization and marginalization to allow more girls to blossom sooner.
This might also increase general awareness and lets people consider sooner that this is even an option. For this, having more eggs exposed to to the option earlier would help, e.g. by making this a topic that’s easy to bring up and discuss in male circles or have more AMAB-female friendships in general4. Targeted information campaigns at CompSci campuses seem like they might have a great return on investment5.
Those measures all assumed that the bottleneck is either people not feeling ready/safe enough to transition and more information and more embracing culture would allow them to, which is probably true, but another possible bottleneck is estrogen supply for those wanting to medically transition. This will get exacerbated once the first set of measures works out well.
To avoid this, we would ofc want to target this in advance. Having doctors be more informed, pharmacies stock all the relevant items, and not too much legal/bureaucratic friction6 so that people can easily get access to HRT if desired.
As these might take time, we can start or fund underground estrogen labs and reduce market frictions (e.g. better platforms for acquisitions), as well as learning how to access them in case someone needs that information7.
Dating
Most demand side interventions I can see only optimize for specific dating markets and since the classic, straight, MLW model has been strongly favoured and reinforced long enough, lets look at options that favour sapphics:
We can reduce comphet in male culture to make MLM and archillean dating more normalized and reduce demand by having more men be in relationships with other men (or male-aligned enbies (menbies?)).
In a similar vein, increasing the quality of male friendships and allowing them to become deeper so that a female partner isn’t the only person taking care of the emotional needs of a given man might help too.
Another option is ofc to advance AI girlfriends and their robotic embodiment and market them to straight men, primarily those dating bi/pan women.
Respectively, on the supply side we can also reduce comphet in female culture to allow women to get clear on their sexuality sooner and find out that they’re bi/pan/lesbian earlier in life.
Apart from demand- and supply-side interventions, we can also increase market efficiency:
First, off, better dating apps and other means to find better matching partners easier reduces search costs and increases quality of relationships, which is good, even not what we set out to do.
Normalizing polyamory and CNM (media, education, legal recognition, how-to resources) similarly improves allocation8, but instead of reducing relationship availability to 0, the reduction is only marginal (there still is polysaturation though, so the reduction non-zero). It might also create incentives for developing better relationship/partnership skills, further increasing quality (even if not supply).
Lastly, UBI + automation9. More time for relationships and learning partnership skills
Now, what metric do we use for this?
$/WRYA (Woman-Relationship-Year-Added) seems like a good start for finding cost-effective interventions. Normalizing polyamory probably wins here since this massively increases the WRYA on a per-woman basis. Increasing girl supply would likely do much less well since our multiplier for any of those is likely less than 2 on a per-woman basis.
However, one limitation is that it ignores quality weighting entirely, which is also an important consideration. So, we need Quality-Adjusted WRYA (QAWRYAs (or Relationship-QALYs I guess)), which can take things like satisfaction, growth, stability, passion, etc. into account, at the cost of being much harder to measure.
Footnotes
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Biological birth ratios are slightly male-biased, with an expected ratio of 105 male births per 100 female births (OWiD), with Europe and US hovering around 105:100, San Marino having a perfect 1:1 ratio, Lichtenstein being the highest at ~116:100 (China is down to ~110:100 but peaked at 117:100 in the early 2000s) ↩
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I thought that women might be more frequently the victims of homicides and that when taking this into account, the life expectancy would become even higher, but apparently men are both mostly the perpetrators and the victims of homicide, with Europe ofc being more egalitarian than North America.
Looking deeper into the data, 81% of homicide victims are men (globally, 2021), but 56% of the female victims were killed by intimate partners or other family members (only 11% for men).
When looking at the table on wikipedia, those with high m/f victim ratios I associate w organized crime, drugs, war. ↩ -
I’m assuming here that 1) many people have most friends be of their AGAB and that 2) female circles are more likely to bring up and discuss things like gender identity and other LGBTQ+ topics ↩
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after all, the saying goes: CS is the only degree where more women graduate than enrol. But then again, maybe that makes it a bad investment, if they’ll transition anyways? This comment also makes information campaigns targeted at TTRPG groups seem worthwhile (or again, maybe particularly not?) ↩
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The right holes in incentive systems (to be written) ↩
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waow
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Thoughts on Polyamory (to be written) ↩