Some jobs are disproportionately concentrated in certain states.
Fashion designers flock to New York, Texas has an outsized share of petroleum engineers, and Louisianians are more likely to be boat pilots or captains than are other Americans.
We made a map that shows the most overrepresented job in each state, among jobs with at least 1,000 people employed, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' recently released May 2016 "Occupational Employment Statistics." Each state has far more of these jobs per capita than the nation as a whole.
We'll discuss the methodology later. First check out the map:
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor Statistics
These are not the most common jobs in these states. That map would be very boring because the most common job in 40 states was "retail salesperson," the most common job in the country.
This map instead shows jobs that are disproportionately concentrated in each state. For example, in New York there were about 7,590 fashion designers out of 9,097,650 employed people. So fashion designers account for about 8.3 out of every 10,000 jobs in New York.
In the US as a whole, there are about 19,230 fashion designers out of 140,400,040 employed people. So about 1.4 of every 10,000 jobs in America are in fashion design.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the ratio of these two rates the location quotient for a job in a particular area. The location quotient of fashion designers in New York is 8.3 divided by 1.4, which equals about 6.1. That is, there are about six times as many fashion designers per 10,000 total employed people in New York as in the US as a whole.
The map shows the job in each state with the highest location quotient, among jobs with at least 1,000 people employed. These jobs exist in each state at much higher rates than in the country as a whole.