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10.28.2001 00:02

BY THE NUMBERS

Females and males:
How many and where?
Age-old issue: For older women, fewer men
• In Rhode Island, women outnumber men by 41,000, according to the census.

BY ARIEL SABAR
Journal Staff Writer

John Silva, 87, is not acquainted with the term "babe magnet." All the same, this silver-haired Don Juan has no trouble finding dance partners at the Rumford Towers holiday parties.

"They come after me," says Silva, a heartthrob with a pacemaker. "Before one dance is over, someone's already asking me for the next dance."

With his full head of hair, firm step, and easy banter, Silva, a retired merchant mariner, clearly owes some of his popularity to charm. But mostly it's a numbers game: he has reached an age at which women vastly outnumber men.

What's more, he lives in a state where the dice are loaded: With 100 females for every 92.5 males, Rhode Island has a higher ratio of females to males than any other state.

Rhode Island seized the title as America's most female state in the past decade, when it leaped ahead of Mississippi, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The gender gap in Rhode Island is widest among the elderly, whose bingo halls, high-rise residences, and social centers can at times seem like man-free zones.

But even among 25- to 34-year-olds, Rhode Island gals outnumber guys. And in the college classrooms here, 42,000 women study alongside 33,000 men.

"The single girls always talk about it," says Erica M. Hole, the student-body president at Rhode Island College, where 7 in 10 students are female. "A lot of my friends will say, 'You can't find a guy here -- it's all girls. It's not fair!' "

Rhode Island may not seem like the female equivalent of manly Alaska. In that frigid state, entire magazines are devoted to helping lonely oil drillers and fishermen find women from the Lower 48 willing to trade a suntan for a soul mate.

Yet the 2000 census shows that Rhode Island's ratio of men to women -- the 92.5 males per 100 females -- is only slightly larger than Alaska's ratio of women to men -- 89 females per 100 males.

All told, Rhode Island's 1 million residents include 41,000 more females than males.

"Tell them to move here," advises Susie Carter Smutz, editor of AlaskaMen, whose latest issue features 120 eligible bachelors.

NATIONALLY, during the 1990s the gap between the female and male populations narrowed. A key reason was that male death rates fell faster than female death rates -- a result of advances in heart-disease treatment, healthier lifestyles, and women's widespread adoption of smoking in the 1950s and '60s. Another reason is that the immigrants in the last decade, especially those from Hispanic countries, tended to be men.

By 2000, for every 100 females, the country had 96.3 males -- up from 95.1 a decade earlier.

The gender gap narrowed in Rhode Island, too, but at a much slower pace. As a result, Rhode Island emerged as America's female "capital." (The actual capital, the District of Columbia, is the only place with a higher female-to-male ratio.)

The reasons for Rhode Island's supremacy are not fully understood. But experts say that some combination of the state's elderly population, colleges, economy, and social programs have helped tip the scales.

AT THE Salvatore Mancini Activity and Resource Center for the elderly, in North Providence, men are in such scarce supply that cribbage and billiards leagues were started to attract more of them.

It worked -- men now even attend aerobics and line-dancing classes. Still, no one is claiming equality of the sexes.

"What we find here is there's probably two men to every ten women," says Karen A. Testa, the executive director.

The reason elderly women outnumber elderly men across the country is longevity: women tend to outlive men. That simple fact is a big reason for Rhode Island's female tilt, because the elderly make up a larger share of the population here than they do in all but five other states.

Yet even Rhode Island's elderly have a higher female-to-male ratio than the elderly in other states. Rhode Islanders 85 and up are 74-percent female, compared with 71 percent nationally.

One theory, says a state health official, is that Rhode Island's high male smoking rate at midcentury meant that a smaller fraction of men here made it into their 80s than did nationally.

Other experts have one word for Rhode Island's higher-than-average proportion of elderly women: Florida.

An unpublished study in the 1990s found that Rhode Island women who retired to Florida with their husbands often returned here after their husbands had died. And they did this in higher proportion than Florida retirees from other states, possibly because of the large family networks that tether Rhode Islanders to their home state.

"You get a lot of elderly single women from Florida coming back to Rhode Island to be with their children," said the study's author, Brown University sociologist Roger C. Avery, in a recent interview.

RHODE ISLAND'S younger population -- specifically, its college students -- is another reason for the abundance of females here.

Rhode Island College offers an example, even if an extreme one. Begun as a teachers' college, the public institution still mainly draws women, especially to its nursing and social-work programs. Some 6,000 of RIC's 8,500 students are female; RIC women compete in 10 varsity sports, compared with only 9 sports for the men.

The image of RIC as a women's college is so entrenched that admissions officials labor to dispel it, in part by promoting the liberal-arts and business programs.

"Obviously, we would like to have more male students," says Holly Shadoian, the director of admissions.

And though the country's total college population is more female than male, the imbalance has a bigger impact in Rhode Island than elsewhere. That's because Rhode Island, with a dozen colleges shoehorned within its borders, has more higher-education students per capita than any other state.

YET OLD FOLKS and college kids are nothing new here. They have certainly predisposed Rhode Island to a high female-male ratio, but they don't entirely explain why over the '90s the state's female population hurtled to national first place.

As some see it, the contortions in the Rhode Island economy in the 1990s drove men over the state's lines.

Manufacturing continued its long decline, shedding nearly 30,000 jobs, most of which were held by men. And Rhode Island was slower than its neighbors to replace the factories with finance and high-technology companies, which also employed more men than women. And so, say the experts, the predominantly male graduates of local business and technical colleges may have been more apt than in the past to look for work outside Rhode Island.

"If the 1990s was the decade of cyber development in America, and if Rhode Island was on the sidelines, it's quite possible that your Massachusetts and your California might have drawn more men," says John P. Fulton, a demographer who is an associate director in the Rhode Island Department of Health.

Few colleges in the state track how many of their Rhode Island students leave the state after graduation.

But figures from one place that does, Bryant College, a business institution, suggest that during the '90s male Rhode Island graduates left the state in slightly greater numbers than female Rhode Island graduates.

Of the some 2,300 Rhode Islanders who have graduated from Bryant since 1991, 13.5 percent of the men live outside the state, compared with 12.2 percent of the women.

And if the 1990s economy gave many Rhode Island men reasons to leave, it laid out a welcome mat for women. The number of sales and service jobs -- which typically draw women -- grew by some 40,000, as any look behind the Providence Place cash registers makes clear.

The experts who credit the economy for Rhode Island's gender divide find support in the census figures showing that Rhode Island's male-female gap widened fastest among those who were 25 to 34 years old -- a stage in life when many college graduates make critical career decisions.

But not everyone agrees.

At the New England Institute of Technology, in Warwick, where the enrollment is 78-percent male, the Massachusetts Miracle certainly exerted a pull. Nonetheless, the graduates from Rhode Island were more likely to commute to out-of-state jobs than to move away, says Catherine Kennedy, the vice president for career development.

FIGURES are not available to measure the effect of Rhode Island's social services on the state's gender mix. Yet some say that the state's expansion of health and welfare benefits over the 1990s -- while other states were cutting them -- may have persuaded some women to stay in Rhode Island, and others to move here.

The state's RIte Care health insurance for low-income families, created in 1994, saw its enrollment grow so fast that it once threatened to destabilize the state budget.

Meanwhile, the national overhaul of welfare in the 1990s led many states to reduce benefits. But Rhode Island cut against the grain, by both expanding the benefits and loosening the standards to qualify. It has also been slower than every other state to shrink its welfare rolls.

Last year, nearly a fifth of its new welfare recipients were recent arrivals from out of state. And, as is true nationally, nearly all adult welfare recipients are women.

WHATEVER its causes, Rhode Island's female majority has not been reflected in earning or political power.

A census survey last year showed that Rhode Island women earned 63 cents for every dollar earned by men -- about the same as the national average. And, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, women made up 23 percent of the Rhode Island General Assembly -- a smaller share than in 21 other state legislatures.

Socially , Rhode Island's female-male ratio has not changed most of the eternal verities of courtship. Young men, for instance, are still the people knocking down the dating-service doors.

"I turn away so many males . . . the ratio could be 92 men to 8 women," says John Holt, president of Tri-State Multi Services, a matchmaking company based in Coventry.

The dating professionals say that men patronizing their services outnumber women until about age 40. Then the women begin to outnumber the men -- especially the men willing to date women their own age.

"Women 50 to 60 have a hard time," says Jean Moore, a consultant with Joyce Siegel & Associates, a Providence matchmaking firm that caters to professionals and executives. "I could start telling you the reasons . . ."

SO IS THERE any place in Rhode Island where, if you held a dance, there'd be too many men?

Two municipalities: Richmond and West Greenwich. The state's fastest-growing towns, they have few elderly residents and minivans full of children -- keys to a male majority.

And a few neighborhoods even recall the 1982 disco song "It's Raining Men": the Cranston census tract containing the Adult Correctional Institutions (3 males for every 1 female); Newport land that houses the Navy (2 males for every 1 female); and the swath of Smithfield containing the male-dominated Bryant College (1.3 males for every 1 female).

RHODE ISLAND'S gender statistic may make for stimulating cocktail-party talk, giving young people one more variable to ponder as they negotiate the minefield of dates and heartbreak. But experts say that the ratio is likely to be of far greater consequence to the bridge-and-mahjong set.

"It's fun to think about what it means at 22," says John Haaga, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based education group, "but it's serious at age 82."

People aged 85 and up, a proportionately larger group in Rhode Island than in most other states, make up one of the fastest-growing segments of the state's population.

Because this group is more female in Rhode Island than it is nationally, Rhode Island may have both a longer-living elderly population and one that requires health care and other services for longer than its counterparts in other states, say the experts.

Elderly women also tend be poorer than elderly men; they typically lack men's larger pensions and Social Security checks. So Rhode Island's elderly may make greater demand than other states' elderly on such programs as Medicaid, which pays for nursing-home care.

And chances are they will get what they want from the political system. The elderly vote at higher rates than any other group, and politicians know it.

Last year, the General Assembly expanded income guidelines for Medicaid to cover thousands more disabled and elderly people. And this month the state Department of Health created the Office of Women's Health.

The General Assembly has also expanded Rhode Island Pharmaceutical Assistance for the Elderly to include drugs for osteoporosis, a bone-thinning disease that primarily afflicts women.

"We heard from seniors from around the state that this was a big issue for a lot of women," says Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, who chairs the Long-Term Care Coordinating Council, one of the groups that drafted the osteoporosis and Medicaid legislation.

ON THE lighter side of all this is the elderly dating scene.

At the senior centers, there is plenty of flirty chatter, eyelash batting, and, yes, jealousy. There is even the occasional marriage proposal.

"Men are hot items around here," says Karen Testa, the executive director of the Salvatore Mancini center. "A man walks through the door and everyone is like 'Is he married?' It's amazing how things don't change at 70."

Yet there are also many elderly widows who have no desire to jump back into the marriage market. Having made it through the Great Depression, World War II, and the child-centered postwar decades, they now relish a phase in life with fewer caretaking responsibilities.

"I've become very independent," says Margaret Pereira, 80, of East Providence, a retired saleswoman and physical therapist who now devotes her time to reading novels, talking with friends, and visiting with her grown children. "I really don't need a man in my life."

TO 87-YEAR-OLD John Silva, the retired merchant mariner who lives at Rumford Towers: "If you're alone, it's no good."

Silva took care of his sick wife for two years before she died, of cancer, in 1993. Wanting companionship again, he now shares his home in the East Providence high-rise for the elderly with a younger woman -- 79-year-old Madeline Mello.

On a recent afternoon, Silva sat in the Towers' small library, looking sharp in a green cardigan and answering questions about his masculine magnetism.

He describes his acts of chivalry: singing to the women in the hallways, waltzing with them at the parties, driving them to the store.

A gray-haired woman passes, pushing a walker down the hall. Silva notices.

"How ya doin', honey?" he says.

The woman turns her head; she knows the game.

"Are you being a good boy?" she says.

It's helpful that Madeline Mello, Silva's girlfriend, says she's not the jealous type.

Silva says that even in high school he had a way with the girls -- in those days, he explains, a lady's man was not a "babe magnet" but a "gigolo."

Silva's a realist, though. He knows that his reputation as "the gigolo of Rumford Towers" owes something to basic math:

"If you've got 137 women to every 1 man, that person's got to be very popular -- you know what I mean?"

-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog .

Find previous Journal reports on Census 2000, statistical profiles for R.I. and Massachusetts cities and towns, charts, maps and related links at:

http://projo.com/news/census/


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