Where the numbers come from
Every other calculator of this kind runs on United States census data. This one covers Germany, France, Italy and Spain — about 102 million men aged 18 to 85. Here is exactly what that means, including the parts that are estimates.
What is measured
Population comes from Eurostat by single year of age, for each country separately. These are counts, not estimates.
Marital status comes from the 2021 European census, also by single year of age. It is a count too, though a census is taken once and the figure here is therefore a few years older than the rest.
Obesity comes from the European Health Interview Survey, per country and per sex. It is published in ten-year age bands and the calculator works in five, so each figure is read as describing the middle of its band and the years in between are interpolated.
Salaries come from the European earnings survey: the first decile, median and ninth decile of what men actually earn, per country. The share of men in work at each age comes from the labour force survey — a man with no job has no salary, and is counted that way rather than as a low earner.
What is modelled
How tall men are around the average. Nobody publishes a full height distribution for an adult population — only averages. Those averages are real, measured, and specific to each country and year of birth, but the spread around them is a reasoned reconstruction.
That assumption matters far more at one end than the other, and it is worth knowing which figures it touches. The average man here is 178cm, so a 180cm bar sits almost exactly on the average and barely moves whatever spread is assumed: between 40% and 42% clear it across every plausible value. A 190cm bar is a different matter — depending on the spread, somewhere between 4% and 7% of men reach it. The taller the requirement, the more of the answer is the assumption rather than the measurement.
The top of the salary range. Published figures stop at the ninth decile, which in Germany is about €85,000. Above that the curve is extrapolated, so any six-figure threshold is answered by the least certain part of this page. It is the number to trust least, and it is checked against outside estimates: this model puts 5.8% of German men above €100,000, and a large German salary survey independently puts 5–6% of employees there.
How a result is calculated
The calculator takes every man in the age range you asked for and works out what share of them clear each of your requirements. Those shares are multiplied together, then divided by the total number of men in that age range.
The figure you get is not a score assigned to you. It is a division: men who match, over men your age, times one hundred.
The limitation that matters
Traits are treated as independent of one another. In reality they are not — taller men earn slightly more, higher earners are less often obese, and older men earn more but are far more likely to be married.
The calculator handles the age relationships properly, because it works age band by age band. What it cannot see is how traits relate within the same age band. That makes the result slightly generous: the real number of men matching a demanding combination is probably a little lower than what you are shown.
Fixing this properly would need person-level records rather than published distributions. Every calculator of this type has the same limitation, including the American ones.
What it is not
It is not a measurement of anyone's worth, and it is not advice. It is arithmetic on public statistics, presented in dog food.
Run your own numbers