How much money do strippers actually make?

This is a question I will certainly return to in one form or another. For now, I will simply throw some statistics at the problem.

Since stripping pays a salary for all effectual purposes, it runs into the same issue as other salary data– it is right-skewed. That is a fancy way of stating that most strippers make relatively little and a handful make a whole bunch.

Thus, the answer to the question of what strippers actually make can be answered with an application of the Empirical Rule. Under the Empirical Rule, about 68% of all strippers’ earnings fall within one standard deviation of the mean. About 95% of all strippers’ earnings fall within two standard deviations of this mean. And most fun of all, 99.73% of all stripper earnings can be said to fall within three standard deviations of the mean.

Ah, but what is the mean?

Truthfully, the mean stripper earnings is approximately 100$ per shift worked, or the equivalent of a good night for a diner waitress.

However, the mean is ALL stripper earnings, even negative amounts (owing the house back fees, or VIP room fees, which sometimes come out of the stripper’s cut). That is why data has a standard deviation. The standard deviation for stripper earnings is about 175$.

In practical terms, this means that 68% of all strippers make between -75$ and 275$ on any given shift. It means 95% of all strippers make between -250 and 450$ (but subtracting the 68% means that you really have only 27% of all strippers making less than -75$ or more than 275$ at this point).

Lastly, it means 99.73% of all strippers make between -425$ and 625$ on any given shift. And again, with subtractions, you can work out how tiny the percentages are for a stripper to make more than 500$ on any given shift.

Some would say that these numbers contradict accepted wisdom about how much strippers make, but these numbers are about as close as one is going to get off-the-cuff for accounting for the strippers who work for free drinks/drugs (even if it is only, say, 20% of all strippers, that’s a lotta 0$ or negative earnings numbers), for accounting for the strippers who think 50-100$ is ‘enough’, and so forth.

In a nutshell, an average stripper can hope to make between 100-300 on any given night, and a top-end hustler can expect to occasionally pull outlier money of above 600$, with regular earnings on the edge of the 2nd and 3rd standard deviation.

This all pretty much only applies to strippers in clubs, though, not those who work for party agencies or do parties independently.

But wait! There is hope that strippers really make more than a lousy 100$ a shift average!

It is Chebyshev’s Theorem. It is a more…flexible way of looking at a data distribution, and may in fact be better for processing the right-skewed data that is stripper income.

According to this theorem, about 75% of all measurements lie within two standard deviations of the mean. About 90% of all measurements lie within three standard deviations of the mean. To borrow the mean and standard deviation from above, this would suggest that 75% of all strippers make between -250$ and 450$ on any given shift, and that 90% (or an additional 15%) make between -425$ and 625$. This opens up the possibility that as much as 10% of strippers earn way more than the mean, perhaps 4, 5, 6, 8 standard deviations more.

However, even under Chebyshev, the core assumption doesn’t really change. Averagely, if someone wants to be a stripper, they are looking at making less than 500$ average and are not unlikely to end up owing money. Alas.

Still what fun to learn what strippers really make, statistically.

The numbers are about as accurate as you can get when your data gathering methods must include copying out the lists of dance/vip tallies at clubs, direct interviews and other not easily nailed-down methods of assessment.