From 2017 to 2021, New Hampshire’s gender ratio changed in what strikes as a surprising way: We gained a lot more males than females.

As the chart above shows, in 2017 women outnumbered men in New Hampshire by more than 13,000, yet by 2000 women only outnumbered men by about 2,700. This chart comes from Vital Signs, the state’s annual publication of economic, demographic and other data about New Hampshire.

I called this shift surprising because males in the US are generally facing higher death rates than females for many reasons and it’s not like the gender ratio of births has switched. All of New Hampshire’s population growth these days is due to in-migration, most from other states – actually, more than all of it is due to in-migration because our deaths outnumber our births.

So it seems either than more men than women are moving here, presumably for jobs, or more women than men are moving away, also presumably for jobs.