To clarify: the game would only create a pop of unmarried ladies if there are significantly more women in the province than men. This could happen if a lot of men died in a war. They should marry very rapidly if men with the same culture, religion and social class are available, and more slowly if there are more social barriers between them and potential mates. Pops would have a balanced number of daughters and sons, so disparities vanish in a generation.
There are examples in the period of single-sex migration creating a gender imbalance in two different regions. The game might or might not represent this, but it can assume that men and women normally emigrate together.
The game would probably represent unmarried women as not holding formal employment and women who marry as becoming part of their husband’s pop. But, men from a minority culture marrying women of a different culture should be a big driver of assimilation, so both spouses might move to a pop with the husband’s profession and the wife’s culture. This is a huge oversimplification, but I think it would add some interesting wrinkles without demanding too much more complexity.
Specifically, it would require: the addition of one or more pop types to represent unmarried women. I’d suggest a type for each social class, to represent the different economic roles of upper- and lower-class ladies, whom they will marry, and whom they will vote for, but you might just have one pop type. These would only be created in special circumstances. Additionally, each pop would get one more number tracking how many of its households are unmarried. Optionally, even though they have the same household finances, one or two statistics might be tracked separately for men and women in the same pop, such as literacy.
Edit: The game’s now been announced, and it sounds like women will be counted as “dependents” within each pop. So “Where have all the husbands gone?” sounds like it might be a high percentage of dependents in the pop, which is very simple.
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