Saturday 25 March 2017

Sex ratios in Equestria

Scootaloo beat that damn Harshwhinny mare (22-18) in #MareMadness. There is justice in this world! :D

As reported on this Equestria Daily page, a guy named Thomas has looked at every pony seen in the show and classified them by age, sex and tribe. There seem to be a couple of errors in his summaries (eg rounding 461:428 to 2:1), but I'm going to assume that the underlying data is accurate. Here is the measure that stood out to me most:

Female:male ratio by tribe
Earth: 461:428 = 1.08:1
Pegasus: 186:120 = 1.55:1
Unicorn: 199:115 = 1.73:1

I haven't done any proper statistical analysis (who do you think I am, Bad Horse?) but the gap between the number for earth ponies and that for the other two tribes really stands out. We think of Equestria as female-dominated, and indeed it is – all the more so if you look at which ponies hold positions of real power. But for earth ponies, it's not far off equality in the population as a whole.

Any in-universe ideas as to why this might be the case?

5 comments:

  1. So we can assume that more unicorn fillies are born than unicorn colts (rather than all the unicorn stallions inexplicably dying out).

    Maybe females are considered the preferred choice for parents, particularly for high society unicorns (for example, because of the princesses), and unicorns have found a way to magically gaurantee a foal will be born female?

    Earth ponies don't have access to such magic, but in any colts are appreciated just as much as fillies, due to the physical nature of the type of work earth ponies do.

    As for the bird horses; I don't know.

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    1. Interesting suggestion. There are some unsettling implications there, especially with regard to being able to choose to have a filly, though that's fertile ground for fanficcing!

      Also, every alicorn in the show is female – at least, if you don't count Dream Big Mac. The sample size is small, and not all of them were born alicorns anyway, but...

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  2. Well, earth ponies are the powerhouses of the pony world, and male ponies have been shown to have been stronger than females in at least some cases. Maybe it just benefits the race to have more strong ponies around to do strong stuff. Pulling plows and carts seems to be easier with more big, strong male ponies around. Any pony can bust clouds and float ribbons around the room, but a wagonload of anvils is heavy!

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    1. Don't let Applejack hear you say that! :P Though I can accept her being out of the ordinary run of things. Even with earth ponies, though, there's still a slight preponderance of mares over stallions. Hmm.

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