Originally published on Mic

On a Friday night in downtown Palo Alto — just a stone’s throw from Stanford University, office buildings and the technology hub of San Jose — the college bars and vegan restaurants lining its streets teemed with single men. But at Nola, a Creole-themed bar with notoriously bad service, Erika, 25, wasn’t having much luck meeting single guys.

“I ordered my drink, and my girlfriend and I threw out glances and smiles to many men we were interested in. However, none of the maybe 30 men surrounding us were eager to start a conversation,” Erika, who lives in nearby San Jose, told Mic. “I would come up to them directly, only to languish in their lack of conversation skills.”

In most urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., where single women handily outnumber men, such a scene would be wholly unfamiliar. But it’s par for the course in the sunny suburban sprawl of San Jose and the surrounding Bay Area cities, home to technology giants like Facebook, Google and Cisco, where college-educated single men outnumber women.

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