It seems like a basic question, but I can’t find it anywhere!
Please, enlighten me- I’ve heard for a fact that there are more women than men by far. I know that in America it’s like 51% women.
Nope: according to the CIA World Factbook, as of July 2005, the estimates were as follows:
So there are about 50 million more male than female children, about 50 million more male than female adults, and about 55 million more female than male elderly, putting the numerical advantage solidly on the male side.
(And as the imbalance between numbers of male and female children continues to grow with the population growth in large countries like China and India that have strong cultural preferences for male offspring and significant “girl deficits”, that inequality is most likely going to get larger.)
Ah!
Then where did the falty idea of women greatly outnumbering men come from about a decade ago?
Can you provide a cite that someone actually made that statement a decade ago? I suspect you are just misremembering what you heard.
Females outnumber males in most developed countries like the United States, because there are proportionately higher numbers in the older age classes where female predominate. But globally, younger age classes predominate, and these are biased toward males.
When I searched on the internet, there were plenty of sources thinking it.
I heard it on Third Rock from the Sun, just a passing mention of a guess. No, I don’t take facts from tv shows, 
but it seemed to be a general opinion what with the surprising knowledge of the slight majority of women in the US.
Ah, a bastion of knowledge!
Okay, there, I got the obligatory joke out of the way. Let’s move on. 
How about providing some links then?
http://www.naseeb.com/naseebvibes/talkbacks.php?tbSortBy=DESC&aid=3631&pg=1&newOffset=290&PHPSESSID=
“Number of women on earth is larger than the number of men.”
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/fatteenwannbes/message/370
“The number of women is more than number of
men and this is a fact supported by spectacular statistics; for example there
are 8 women for every man in Sweden.”
http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?art_ID=2406488
“as in normal circumstances in any society it has been found that the number of women is more than the number of men.”
www.khmerforum.com/printthread.php?threadid=186
“As you know in Cambodia and also in the world the number of women is more than men.”
http://ifaq.wap.org/sex/50factsaboutmen.html
“Marrying a divorced man is ecologically responsible. In a world where there are more women than men, it pays to recycle.”
http://www.fancyrobot.com/2004/02/the_valentines_.html
“Since there are more women than men in the world, I assume that somewhere there was a party that was all women.”
Here, a Google page of almost 1,000 pages saying the same thing.
The bottom line: many of these people claiming this are foreigners or others who are uneducated or didn’t bother to research it :D. They should join or website ;).
Also, it has a kind of girl power thing to it, maybe?
Ok, all but one of those are either message boards or blogs (or in one case a list of jokes). The one exception is a newspaper interview with someone who is just talking out of her ass. Not exactly authorative sources.
I grant you this is evidently a popular misconception, but the idea comes from the fact that females actually do outnumber males in the developed world. Also, even in the developing world, there are usually more female adults than males, males being more numerous only among children. So it may actually be true that there are more women (adult females) than men (adult males) globally (although I am not going to try to figure out if this is actually the case).
One of the first hits on that Google search page I linked to above is this smart dude, Amartya Sen, who wrote a cover story for Frontline magazine in November of 2001 in which he says:
“It is sometimes presumed that there are more women than men in the world, since that is well-known to be the case in Europe and North America, which have a female to male ratio of 1.05 or so, on the average (that is, about 105 women per 100 men). But women do not outnumber men in the world as a whole; indeed there are only about 98 women per 100 men on the globe. This “shortfall” of women is most acute in Asia and North Africa. For example, the number of females per 100 males in the total population is 97 in Egypt and Iran, 95 in Bangladesh and Turkey, 94 in China, 93 in India and Pakistan, and 84 in Saudi Arabia (though the last ratio is considerably reduced by the presence of male migrant workers from elsewhere who come to Saudi Arabia).”
Wait a second. I call “no way” on this statistic.
Uh, that’s what he was asked to prove - that it was a broadly held opinion.
Are you citing this in reference to my speculation that there might be more adult females in the world than adult males? Since Sen is clearly not differentiating between adults and children, his statements don’t bear on the question one way or the other.
This said, I would assume that virtually everyone who makes the statement that there are more “women” globally actually means “females,” and are simply making a mistake. They are probably not making that statement because they are making a distinction between adults and children.
It hasn’t really been very clear what andrew thought of the idea. Read the OP. He originally said he “heard for a fact.”
No, I was just quoting him b/c he seems to know his stuff and he’s talking about what we want to know.
It’s too bad about the Swedish thing- Swedish girls be HOT!
Is this not what you were replying to then, andrewdt85? (Bolding mine.)
Yep, that’s what I was replying to. But now I just care about the academic pursuit of the question of female population on earth.
Will it require any more effort than looking at the July 2005 figures I posted in post #2 above?
Women in 15–64 age range: 2,066,864,970
Women in 65 and over age range: 263,627,270
Total adult women in global pop.: 2,330,492,240
Men in 15–64 age range: 2,117,230,183
Men in 65 and over age range: 207,903,775
Total adult men in global pop.: 2,325,133,958
There you go: there are indeed about 5 million more adult women than adult men in the global population, although that difference is pretty small percentagewise. And it will probably go negative pretty soon as the world population becomes dominated by the more recent, heavily-male-weighted generations.