Gay Britain: what do the statistics say?


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We've got the numbers on sexuality in the UK but are they reliable? Photograph: David Poller/Corbis

For every 100 people in Britain, just 1 will identify themselves as gay or lesbian according to the latest government statistics. The numbers (which include gender, location and age) may come as a surprise - but why?

1.5% of the UK?

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.

93.5% of people said they were 'heterosexual' or 'straight', just 1.1% said they were 'gay' or 'lesbian' and 0.4% said they were bisexual. The small fraction that was left either refused to answer or said they didn't know. Altogether, amounts to about 545,000 homosexual and 220,000 bisexual adults in the UK.

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. When they were analysing the financial implications of the new Civil Partnerships Act, the Treasury estimated it was 6%. Stonewall, a gay rights charity reckon that 5-7% "is a reasonable estimate".

10% of the US?

Do 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. 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).

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. 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. Kinsey".

And yet, many people estimate even higher numbers than Kinsey himself did. In 2011, a Gallup poll asked over 1,000 adults across the US "what % of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?". On average, respondents guessed that 1 in 4 Americans were.

Fascinatingly, 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. So we know lots of people get it wrong, what do the latest statistics say?

Gay men outnumber gay women?

While 1.5% of men in the UK say they're gay, only 0.7% of women say the same. But that trend is reversed when it comes to the identity 'bisexual' - 0.3% of men select this, compared to 0.5% of women. Slightly more women than men say 'don't know' or refuse to answer the question - 3.8% compared to 3.5% of men.

Gay capital?

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.


Those aged between 16 and 24 were by far the most likely to say they were gay, lesbian or bisexual - 2.7% of them did - a proportion that steadily declines as you inch up the age scale.

One possible explanation

The more detailed breakdown of responses is revealing - it points to a potential problem with the survey. Maybe the huge differences between people's estimates about the size of the gay population and their responses about their own sexual identification is about more than just bad guesses. Maybe it reveals the extent to which taboos persist (particularly for older people and those living in more conservative parts of the country) so individuals remain reluctant to tell the truth - a reluctance that manifests itself in under-estimates about personal sexual identity and over-estimates about other people's.

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