PHILADELPHIA _ At 74, Rosa Rodriguez keeps outliving her men.
Her husband and two boyfriends died at relatively young ages. Meanwhile, Rodriguez, a former worker in a sewing factory, continues to enjoy cooking, watching TV and socializing at Norris Square Senior Community Center.
"Men don't take care of themselves like women do," said the mother of five, who moved to Philadelphia from Puerto Rico 60 years ago. "Sometimes I'm lonely. But a lot of the time, I'm just fine."
Rodriguez is part of a surprising state of affairs here: The imbalance between the number of adult women and men is so great that, among the nation's 10 biggest cities, Philadelphia is the most predominantly female.
Within the city, women outnumber men by about 90,000, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of U.S. Census Bureau figures. That works out to 86.4 men for every 100 women. On the other end of the scale, San Jose, Calif., has 100.2 men for every 100 women, possibly because of the male-dominated tech industry.
"Philadelphia is a city of women," said Thelma Kennerly, who runs a food kitchen at Devereux United Methodist Church in Tioga. "Our men are dead or in jail. But women are still out here. Women are the stronger ones."
Nationwide, the ratio of females to males is nearly balanced at 51% to 49%. But in Philadelphia, census figures show, 53.6% of the 1,240,047 adult residents are women (665,238 individuals) and 46.4% are men (574,809 individuals).
It doesn't start out so skewed. In fact, between ages 10 and 17, boys outnumber girls in Philadelphia: 106 males for every 100 females. But then gender imbalance begins to reverse and announces itself more and more dramatically during the aging process, as the number of men relative to women diminishes.
It's no coincidence that along with being the most female, Philadelphia is also the poorest of America's large cities, with nearly 1 out of every 4 residents living in poverty.
As though to underscore the point, within the two surrounding counties with the highest poverty rates _ Delaware and Camden counties _ women also significantly outnumber men: 52.7% to 47.3%, and 52.6% to 47.4%, respectively.
Poverty is a major part of the story. Related aspects of indigence such as incarceration, racism, violence, insufficient health care, and physically taxing or even dangerous jobs take their toll on men in the city _ most strikingly, low-income African Americans.
