Who Do Designers Marry?

A new infographic from Bloomberg charts out most common matchups based on profession—and some curious patterns emerge.

Whoever said love is a mystery was clearly living before a time of big data. The latest example: Bloomberg has charted out the likelihood of potential marriages based on profession.

Bloomberg‘s data visualization developer Adam Pearce and contributing graphics editor Dorothy Gambrell pulled data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey, which surveyed over 3.5 million households about marital status and professions, among other topics. As a result, the professions in the chart range from the obvious (nurse, schoolteacher) to the esoteric (Derrick, rotary, drill and service unit operators). The chart is simple to use: scroll your mouse over a profession listed and it highlights the five most common matches, with the color of the line depicting the genders (i.e. a blue to red line denotes male to female, so you can see that male detectives most often fall for female elementary and middle school teachers). The five results include both hetero marriages and same sex marriages.

Clicking around the chart is surprisingly addicting; it’s like a mashup of a dating app and a vocational test. Some of the results can be expected. High-earning professionals that require long hours—like surgeons, dentists and lawyers—tend to marry one another. And male CEOs, it turns out, are still marrying their secretaries (Female CEOs, on the other hand, go for men in managerial positions). Others are downright puzzling. Why do so many professional dancers have a thing for welders? Others prove enlightening. Wondering how to land a male carpenter? Be a secretary or admin assistant. As for designers? They tend to stick together, though the second choice for female designers is, curiously, legislators.

To check out the chart for yourself, head over the Bloomberg.

via co.design