The Growing Gender Gap Around Sexual Orientation
Rainbow flags fly during the NYC Pride Parade 2024 near the Stonewall National Monument. (Photo by Tong Su)
(ANALYSIS) One of the things that I try to drill into my graduate students in research methods is every assumption needs to be tested in a rigorous way. Many of the ideas for this newsletter start by simply asking myself the question, “I wonder if that widely accepted thing people say is actually true?”
Here’s a statement that I have heard a couple of times in the last few months, that just stuck in my brain for a while:
”Women are much more supportive of the LGBT population than men.” That came up in a Q&A session that I did after a talk. The person asked if women were leaving conservative churches more quickly because of their views of same-sex marriage and gender identity. The implication of that question is pretty simple — women are more supportive than men of those who are not straight or cisgender.
OK, so let me just figure out if that’s true or not.
A good place to start would be to find out if women are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ compared to men. To accomplish that I combined the last seven years of the Cooperative Election Study (which started asking a question about sexuality back in 2016).
Then I just calculated the share of men and women who said that they were straight by birth year.
Among older folks, there’s a persistent gender gap on this question. For instance, among women born in the 1960s, at least 90% of them say that they are straight. For men born in the same decade, it’s a bit lower, with about 85% saying they are straight.
But the gap does begin to narrow when you start tracing those lines through people born in the 1980s. For folks born between 1985 and 1990, the difference is a single percentage point.
But look at what happens for the sample that was born after 1990. The gap reverses itself. Among men born between 1995 and 2000, about 75% of them are straight.
For women from the same birth cohort, it’s much closer to 65%. Think about it this way — about 85% of men born in 1970 are straight. It’s 75% of men born in 2000.
Among women born in 1970, 90% are straight. For women born around 2000, it’s about 65% and dropping quickly.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.