Method
The Odds in plain English
No spreadsheet required. We start with the whole adult room, then ask: after your list, how many people are still standing?
The one-sentence version
The lime percent is the share of adult men or women who match all of your filters at the same time — using official US numbers on the US side and official Canadian numbers on the Canada side.
1
Start with everyone
We begin with all adults 18+ of the gender you picked — men or women — in the United States, Canada, or both. That is the full room.
2
Each filter keeps a slice
Age, height, income, ancestry, and the rest each keep only the people who match. The lime bars on The Odds are that slice: “kept 16%” means 84% just left the room.
3
Stack the slices
The big lime number is what is left after every filter, one after another. If age keeps 1 in 6 and height keeps 1 in 2 of those, you now have about 1 in 12.
4
Turn it into people
That leftover share is multiplied by the real adult population. So 0.18% of US men is still hundreds of thousands of people — rare as a percent, not “nobody.”
A tiny example
Imagine 1,000 adult men. Age 25–34 keeps about 160. “At least 5′9″” keeps about half of those, so 88. A $75,000 income keeps about 1 in 5 of those, so roughly 17 people — about 1.7%. That is the same math The Odds runs, just with census-sized rooms instead of 1,000.
Quick check we use on ourselves: about 15% of US adult men are 6′0″ or taller. Right now the engine says 14.7%. If that ever drifts, the height math is wrong.
What the labels mean
- Broad — lots of people clear this bar.
- Realistic — picky, but still a real dating pool.
- Selective / Highly selective — possible, just thin.
- Statistical unicorn — the census barely has this combination.
What this is not
- Not who is on an app, single, or interested in you.
- Not a personality test. The Pull (astrology) is a separate, fun room.
- Not perfect. Tall and high-income overlap in real life, so stacking filters can make the result look a little rarer than it is. We flag that when you stack several.
- US dollars stay US dollars. Canadian dollars stay Canadian dollars. We do not convert currencies.
- In Canada, common-law counts as partnered. “Hispanic” on the Canada side means Latin American in the census.
Where the numbers come from
United States. Census ACS 2024 for how many adults, marriage, education. NHANES 2021–23 for height. CDC for obesity. ACS race/ethnicity (White here means non-Hispanic White).
Canada. Statistics Canada population for 1 July 2025. Canadian Health Measures Survey for height and obesity. 2021 Census for marriage and common-law, visible-minority groups, and education.
Full table IDs live in sources.json for anyone who wants to audit the cubes.