Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds
Women ages 18 to 26 were more than twice as likely to identify as LGBTQ than their millennial counterparts, the survey found.
March 13, 2024, 1:00 AM PDT
By Brooke SopelsaThe percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer adults in the U.S. continues to increase, reaching an all-time high of 7.6% in 2023, according to a new Gallup report. Broken down by gender, the survey of 12,000 people 18 and older across the country found that women were nearly twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ.
“Almost 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told NBC News. “That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening.”
This is the first year Gallup has laid out its annual LGBTQ identification report in a way that breaks down each generation by gender. Looking at all generations, 8.5% of women and 4.7% of men identified as LGBTQ, the survey found. The survey reported margins of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points among LGBTQ respondents.
Parsing each generation, the gender story gets more interesting. In the three younger generations surveyed—Generation Z, millennials and Generation X—women are more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ. However, in the two oldest generations—baby boomers and the Silent Generation—it is reversed. (The gender breakdown does not account for nonbinary respondents, who represented about 1% of those surveyed.)
The group most likely to identify as LGBTQ, by far, was Generation Z women (ages 18 to 26), 28.5% of whom identified as LGBTQ in the survey. The lion’s share of them, of all Gen Z women surveyed, 20.7%, identified as bisexual, followed by 5.4% who identified as lesbians. Gen Z women were nearly three times more likely than Gen Z men to identify as LGBTQ.
In days of yore, people who identified on surveys as “bisexual” tended to have strong urges and low self-control. My recollection from reading late 20th century social science reports is that they tended to live chaotic lives, and not just in the bedroom. They’d be unemployed more, drink more, have more traffic accidents, be arrested more, things like that.
Nowadays, it seems as “bisexual” is coming to mean more like a young woman who doesn’t want to have sex with anyone.
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