The percentage of Britons saying they're gay, lesbian or bisexual is far higher in London than anywhere else in the UK - 2.5% compared to just 1.1% in Northern Ireland and 1% in the East of England. Slightly more women than men say 'don't know' or refuse to answer the question - 3.8% compared to 3.5% of men.
But that trend is reversed when it comes to the identity 'bisexual' - 0.3% of men select this, compared to 0.5% of women. While 1.5% of men in the UK say they're gay, only 0.7% of women say the same. So we know lots of people get it wrong, what do the latest statistics say? Gay men outnumber gay women? On average, respondents guessed that 1 in 4 Americans were.įascinatingly, Democrats guessed a higher % of Americans were gay than Republicans did (28% compared to 20%) and higher estimates were also given by lower-income Americans, less educated individuals, young people and women. In 2011, a Gallup poll asked over 1,000 adults across the US "what % of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?". Kinsey".Īnd yet, many people estimate even higher numbers than Kinsey himself did. Soon after it was published, statisticians from the American Statistical Association claimed " a random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Though the reports broke long-held taboos on reporting about sexual orientation, the methodology used by Kinsey quickly came under strong criticism for being extremely unreliable. That number made its way into public assumptions and poor press reporting through the Kinsey Reports, two books written by a zoologist at Indiana University - Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (written in 1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). 10% of the US?ĭo those figures seem low? One reason they might is that the number one in ten has long-persisted in popular culture as a reliable guesstimate of homosexuality rates.
Stonewall, a gay rights charity reckon that 5-7% "is a reasonable estimate". When they were analysing the financial implications of the new Civil Partnerships Act, the Treasury estimated it was 6%. The claim that just 1.5% of people in Britain are gay, lesbian or bisexual will come as a surprise to some - even perhaps those in government. Altogether, amounts to about 545,000 homosexual and 220,000 bisexual adults in the UK. The small fraction that was left either refused to answer or said they didn't know. In its 'Integrated Household Survey', the Office for National Statistics asks 178,197 people about their sexual identity - and the vast majority of them choose to answer.ĩ3.5% of people said they were 'heterosexual' or 'straight', just 1.1% said they were 'gay' or 'lesbian' and 0.4% said they were bisexual.