Well, we can’t just shoot women as if they were unwanted animals in the wild (at least not in the Netherlands) and we can’t tell them to go and live in smaller cities and ‘spread out’ (pardon the pun) like some politicians tell immigrants to do.
There are too many young women in big cities, as they go off to study and young men stay behind in the smaller towns, according to a professor in newspaper NRC. Statistic Netherlands backs this up too, saying that Utrecht and Rotterdam (as well as Amsterdam and The Hague if we count the four big cities) are full of females, too.
Knowing that more women study than men helps me believe this is true, but I think a better story would be why there are not enough men in the big cities, or that’s just me as a woman thinking out loud. In the regions of Oost-Groningen, large parts of Friesland, the Achterhoek, Limburg (not the South) and a few other patches, there are too many young men. Why do the men stay behind? If they don’t study more, don’t raise families and don’t take care of the elderly, are they, what, gaming all day? Of course not, hopefully, but I would like to know why.
And then there’s the ‘conclusion’ that “many women in their thirties are still single”, whereas my female brain reads that there are too many men who are taken at that age (and — surprise — many of them will be divorced soon enough).
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Half baked.
(Link: parool.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)
