America’s story is being told by the numbers.
We’re gayer. Women are more prominent than ever. We are going to fewer rodeos, more baseball games and still watching a lot of TV.
A treasure trove of interesting, odd and illuminating statistics is revealed in the 135th edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which will be published this week.
The data will “serve as an answer book to basic statistical questions,” said Dan Coyle, product manager for the data firm ProQuest. He said the information helps us “to understand who we are, what we are about, and how we’re changing.”
For example:
* There are 646,464 same-sex households in the United States, according to census data compiled in the abstract. That includes 48,932 in New York state.
* Coffee consumption is down, while peanut eating is on the upswing.
* About 70 percent of all adults ages 18 to 34 own a laptop.
* The data found 53 percent of men spend their leisure time watching TV, while for women, the number was 48 percent.
* Unwed mothers were responsible for 41 percent of births in the country in 2010, compared with 33 percent in 1990.
Still, women have been making gains in society. They accounted for 40 percent of all science and engineering doctorate degrees in 2010, a leap from just 27.9 percent in 1990.
In the workplace, 19 percent of us reported being in the same job for 12 months or less, while another 20 percent had held the same job for five to nine years.
New Yorkers have the longest commutes, with 40 percent reporting more than 35 minutes. Despite the Big Apple’s density, only 10 percent of us reported walking to work, compared with 11 percent in Washington, DC.
We love our pets, too — and the poorer we are, the more likely we are to have pet birds. Some 4.4 percent of households earning less than $20,000 a year have an avian friend.
But our cowboy past is fading. There were just 572 rodeos held in 2011, down from 754 in 1990.
For the first time, the compendium — made up from US Census, government agency and private sector data — was published by a private company because of federal budget cuts.