Looking for a ‘Man in Finance’? The stats might be against you.

What are the odds of finding a man in finance, 6’5”, with blue eyes and a trust fund?

It’s a popular question in some internet circles after the now-ubiquitous “Man in Finance” meme from New Yorker Megan Boni went supernova viral.

The 19-second video now has 40 million views and counting — plus countless stitches, star remixes, a London flash mob and a talent deal for its creator.

And one response video has garnered its creator more than 8 million views. Last month, Rae Hodge, a Los Angeles-based corporate strategy director, brought her engineering degree to bear in identifying the odds that Boni could find what she was looking for: A man in finance with a trust fund who is 6’5” and has blue eyes.

Hodge, who goes by @maxedoutmommy on TikTok, posted a roughly 2-minute video in which she breaks down the stats to estimate how many people in the United States fit Boni’s description. As she stands before a projector wall, she presents the odds to an audience of one: her husband.

Her conclusion? Out of roughly 101 million men in the country, exactly two would fit the description.

Her post was flooded with 15,000 comments — more than the original meme received.

“A man in finance would be APPALLED by this math 😂,” wrote the top commenter.

“This is not how statistics work, but I get the point,” wrote another.

“So you’re saying there’s a chance?” wrote a third.

It’s not Hodge’s first time applying her STEM background to seemingly frivolous internet questions. She’s made presentations about internet conspiracies like where Princess Kate really was, or who is using all the glitter

“I live in PowerPoint and Excel for work,” Hodge said. “If you know me, you know I’ve made presentations for all sorts of ridiculous things.”

When Boni’s “Man in Finance” video wormed its way into the internet’s ears, Hodge couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I was just sitting in the car wondering what the odds of actually finding a man in finance with a trust fund, 6’5”, blue eyes are,” she said in a Zoom interview this week. "So I did very back-of-the-envelope math for it, what we call ‘strategy math’ at work.”

As she noted in the video’s description, Hodge said she made huge statistical assumptions for the sake of having a simple calculation. Those assumptions are overly broad, she said, but the math indeed works out.

“A lot of comments were saying, “this is girl math, this girl never passed statistics class, this is not correct math,'” Hodge said. “It actually is. I did actually take advanced statistics, forecasting, regressions and stochastics in school.”

‘What we know about the world matters when we’re trying to do math like this’

Chelsea Daniels, a doctoral candidate at NYU who teaches Intro to Statistics in the graduate sociology department, said Hodge’s mathematical approach made sense.

“The issue people are having with this TikTok isn’t really with the math,” she said. “It’s with the independence assumption.”

In statistics, independence refers to the probability of one outcome being completely unrelated to the probability of another: The traits are independent, or uncorrelated.

For simplicity, Hodge had assumed that all the traits that Boni was looking for were uncorrelated. But in reality, having blue eyes and working in finance are correlated. The finance industry is 75% white, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And blue eyes are more common in people of European descent.

Whiteness may also correlate with having a trust fund, given that generational wealth in the United States has largely been accrued among white families. Even height may correlate with the other attributes, as more than a century of research has linked height and financial success.

“This is where what we know about the world matters when we’re trying to do math like this,” Daniels said.

Compounding correlations abound, according to Daniels. “There’s the correlation between having a trust fund and working in finance, but there’s also the correlation between having a trust fund, working in finance, and being 6’5"," she said.

“People love a tall man,” added Daniels. “They’re ready to hire him and believe him and let him manage their finances.”

As silly as the TikTok stats video may be, she said, it gets at interesting questions about living in a world of so much data and being careful about how we use it.

“When machine learning algorithms, or whoever, are doing their statistics, are they being careful about their assumptions?” Daniels said. “How much bad statistics is being done out there in the world?”

One thing Daniels is “10,000%” certain of? More than two men in the U.S. fit the original TikTok's bill.

Here’s what we know: Out of 6.73 million people working in the broad “finance and insurance” sector in 2023, 47.2% were male, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 2022, around 6% of American families reported having a trust fund or outside-managed investment account.

Roughly a tenth of 1% of U.S. men are 6’5” or taller.

A 2014 survey published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology found that 27% of the U.S. population had blue eyes.

Everything else requires an assumption, Daniels said. As a statistician, she was not comfortable making those broad assumptions herself.

But a Gothamist analysis that used those numbers and assumed something between moderate and high correlation between traits including blue eyes, extreme height, and having a trust fund found 100 to 250 men in the United States who are in finance, 6’5”, and have a trust fund and blue eyes.

In New York City, the odds drop to about 30 men, assuming further correlation between success in height, business and living in the city.

“As long as you make logical acknowledgements of the shortcomings, it might … it’s getting closer at least,” Daniels said when reviewing the steps of the analysis.

Boni, who lives in New York, never specified in her TikTok where she was looking for this man. She also didn't specify his age, marital status or sexual preference.

But as Hodge points out, Boni didn’t specify a country for her search, either.

“She might have more luck going somewhere like Denmark,” Hodge said.