Category Archives: lgbtqia

How to design surveys that represent asexuals

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[CW: mentions of sex.]

Most surveys that discuss the matter almost certainly misrepresent the asexual population in one way or another. Fortunately, if you’re creating a survey, or interpreting results from a previously-conducted survey, there are ways to make your results more accurate!

This post is based on my previous post about asexuality, which contains more detailed sources and reasons why I think this topic is important. The idea of this post can probably also be applied to representing diverse sexual preferences or even gender identities (e.g. allow varied responses, don’t make assumptions), but the specific suggestions are targeted towards asexuality. Feel free to share this with people who are designing surveys.

Remember that asexuality and aromanticism exist

If your survey touches in any way on romance, sexuality, relationships, or related behaviors, the most important thing is to know and account for the fact that asexuality exists at all.

The basics: Asexuality is an umbrella term for people who don’t experience sexual attraction. 1-8% of people are or could be called asexual (more info here). Asexual people aren’t an easily-dismissed minority, and they are in your sample demographic. (Probably.) Aromanticism, similarly, is not having romantic interest. We don’t know how many aromantics there are, but they’re certainly out there. People may be aromantic and asexual, or either one, or neither. Some people consider asexuality and aromanticism to fall under the LGBTQ demographic, some people don’t. (The extended LGBTQIA+ acronym does include asexuals – that’s what the ‘a’ is supposed to stand for.) More information can be found here.

In representing asexual people in your results, the first question is what you’re using your data for.

My survey is about general identity/demographic information

We might expect 2x-4x as many romantic asexuals as aromantic asexuals (where do these numbers come from?). This is important because people on the asexual or aromantic spectrum have multiple identities – they might be biromantic and gray-asexual, or aromantic and homosexual, or heteroromantic and demisexual. This means that a question like the following is likely to lead to inaccurate answers:

What’s your orientation?

  • Heterosexual
  • Homosexual
  • Bi/pansexual
  • Asexual

One community survey found that the number of asexuals doubled when asexuality was asked about separately. You could do the same thing:

What’s your orientation?

  • Heterosexual
  • Homosexual
  • Bi/pansexual
  • Other

Are you asexual?

  • Yes
  • No

A solution that might be less confusing for people who don’t know what asexuality is, is to allow respondents to check multiple boxes, e.g.:

Check which of the following best describe your sexual/romantic orientation:

( ) Heterosexual
( ) Homosexual
( ) Bi/pansexual
( ) Asexual

It would also be nice (and more accurate) to include some other options:

( ) Gray-asexual
( ) Demisexual
( ) Other

You could also ask about romantic and sexual orientation separately:

What is your sexual orientation?

  • Heterosexual
  • Homosexual
  • Bi/pansexual
  • Asexual
  • Other

What is your romantic orientation?

  • Heteroromantic(attracted to another gender)
  • Homoromantic (attracted to your same gender)
  • Bi/panromantic (attracted to all genders)
  • Aromantic (do not experience romantic attraction)
  • Other

(Edit, 3/4/17: Siggy points out in the comments that it’s important to include an “other” or write-in response on romantic orientation questions, as well as sexual orientation.)

You could also just have a write-in response:

What is your sexual/romantic orientation?  ___________________

You can then bin responses like “straight” and “heterosexual” as meaning the same thing, or, say, “aro-ace” and “gray-asexual lesbian” as both being on the asexual spectrum.

There is a downside in that people don’t necessarily know what “heteroromantic” means right away, even if they are that. (So if you’re going with options with less-familiar words, include definitions.)

Weed out troll answers with a lizardman question

The problem with more questions or write-ins is that those open up options to troll or confusing responses, perhaps from people who disagree with the basis of the question, or don’t understand.

Since people who troll on a gender or orientation question are likely to troll on other parts of the quiz, you could throw in a lizardman question – an absurd question designed to weed out troll respondents (or at least calibrate the honesty of participants).

In middle school, we got drug use surveys that asked us to check if we had ever done marijuana, heroin, hallucinogens, amphetamines, perscription drugs, inhalants, or derbisol (also known as DB, dirt, wagon wheels, or hope.) We asked the health teacher what “derbisol” was after the test, and she looked it up, and derbisol isn’t real – it’s a lizardman answer. (Apparently, 18.2% of high-schoolers in some groups have claimed to use derbisol. Remember: if you don’t talk to your kids about wagon wheels, bloggers will.)

The point is that you can adapt a lizardman question to a variety of contexts.

My survey is about sexual/romantic/relationship behavior

The keys here are A) remember that asexuality and aromanticism exist, and B) ask about behavior or preferences rather than making assumptions.

  • Many asexual people date people.
  • Some asexuals sometimes have sex.
  • Some people who don’t identify as asexual still don’t want to have sex for whatever reason.
  • Someone who’s gray-asexual may normally round themselves off as “asexual” on surveys, but have experienced sexual attraction before.
  • Some people are asexual but don’t know it.
  • Asexual people may or may not identify as queer.
  • Etc.

So if your question is about, say, attitudes from people who have or want to have sex with women, don’t ask if they’re heterosexual/bisexual men or homosexual/bisexual women. Instead, ask if your respondent has or wants to have sex with women.

Same goes for relationships.

The Asexual Identification Scale is 12 questions about behavior and preferences that capture 90% of asexual people, and can also identify asexual people who don’t realize they’re asexual. If you’re curious specifically about asexual-type behaviors, this may be your answer.

My survey is gathering data for both demographics and behaviors

State what you’re using the data for. For instance, if you have one question to ask college students about their orientation and who they’re likely to date, state that your study is  about dating preferences.

You won’t get a complete picture of people’s orientations, but you weren’t going to anyways with one multiple-choice question. And people with complicated identities (like “biromantic asexual”) are more likely to write in the part that represents who they’re planning to date, not have sex with. If you’re using the response to gather information about STD risk, make it clear that your question is about sexual activity. (And then clarify what “sexual activities” you’re talking about, since people define that differently too and it’s probably relevant to STD risk. Specificity counts!)

2. Avoid over-generalizing from your results. If you’re using data from a question like the first one (“pick one: homosexual, heterosexual, bi/pansexual, or asexual”), realize that your answers for who dates or has sex with whom are necessarily fuzzy, because your results are representing asexuals and aromantics poorly.

How many asexuals are there?

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Edited and updated as of 3/4/17. TL;DR: The popularly cited figure of 1% of the population being asexual is probably wrong, and the true fraction is probably higher. Determining this is hampered by the fact that asexuality is an umbrella term, and that most people still don’t know what asexuality is.

Content warning: discussion of sex.

An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently. Asexuality is just beginning to be the subject of scientific research. [Asexual Visibility and Education Network, Overview]

Popular literature says that 1% of the population is asexual. Is this true?

The 1% figure comes from Anthony F. Bogaert, who published a 2004 survey of 18,876 adults in British households, who responded to the following survey:

I have felt sexually attracted to…

  1. Only females, never to males
  2. More often to females, and at least once to a male
  3. About equally often to males and females
  4. More often to males, and at least once to a female
  5. Only males, never to females
  6. I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all.

In the follow-up questions, they were asked: “How old were you when you first had any type of experience of a sexual kind – for example, kissing, cuddling, petting – with someone of the opposite sex?” (As well as for the same sex.) I believe that subjects saw that question after having answered the first one.

1% of respondents answered with (6), and this is where the “1% of people are asexual” number comes from.

Why am I not content with this number?

First of all, people sometimes frame this as “1% of the population identifies as asexual.” We have no idea if this is true.

That said, aside from being over a decade old, the question itself likely doesn’t represent the asexual (or potentially asexual) population. Many asexuals do experience sexual attraction, but extremely rarely (depending on how rarely, these people might consider themselves gray-asexual, or just functionally asexual with maybe a handful of exceptions.) Many asexuals experience romantic or aesthetic attraction, and it can be very difficult to distinguish between romantic and aesthetic and sexual attraction if your culture doesn’t give you the affordance for doing so. So even if the households surveyed represent the general population, I would still expect the 1% number to under-represent how many asexual people there are.

As a counter-point, it’s also certainly possible to have a low libido or low sexual interest as a result of a physical health-, mental health-, or something else-related, reason. While some people with this camp might permanently identify as asexual, others don’t, or might only realize that their low sexual interest isn’t as innate as they thought once they get treatment, or improve other parts of their lives. Late bloomers might also develop sexual attraction far after their peers. So we’d expect there to be some people who identify as asexual, but actually aren’t (or wouldn’t in better circumstances), as well.

Note that in a later piece, Bogaert says that as awareness of asexuality grows, he doesn’t know what the true number is either.

Kinsey’s “Group X”

Alfred Kinsey, the founder of modern sexology, created his famous 1-6 “Kinsey Scale” of heterosexuality to homosexuality. He also included “Group X”, a group he found to have “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions.” I haven’t read Kinsey’s work myself, but the Asexuality Wiki quotes from Sexual Behavior of the Human Female that:

Group % in “Group X”
Unmarried females 14-19%
Married females 5-8%
Previously married females 5-8%
Unmarried males 3-4%
Married males 0%
Previously married males 1-2%

14-19% of unmarried women! (Obviously, there’s a selection effect here – if you’re asexual-aromantic, you’re much less likely to get married.) I don’t know how much of the population at the time fell into the married/unmarried/previously-married categories. Also, the data is old, and Kinsey may not have distinguished romantic and sexual attraction.

That said, it’s safe to say that if Kinsey’s population was anywhere near representative, >1% of respondents fell into “category X”. If the “married” and “unmarried” people were each 25% of the total, we’re talking 5.5-7.8% of people in “Group X”.

Other categories

A 2014 survey pf University of California system campuses, with respondents composed roughly evenly of both students and faculty/staff (~80,000 total), asked readers to check which term best described their sexual orientation, out of: asexual, bisexual, gay, heterosexual, lesbian, queer, questioning, or other (“please specify.”) 4.6% of respondents responded with “asexual”. While limited to college students and faculty, and not the question I would have asked, this still had by far the greatest sample size of any survey discussed here.

A 1983 study by Paula S. Nurius of 689 mostly university students from New York, Kansas, Wisconsin, Hawaii, and California found 10% of women and 5% of men were “asexual”, having on low scores of both homosexual and heterosexual preferences according to the Sexual Activity and Preference Scale (SAPS). (They also found that this group was the most likely to be depressed and have self-esteem problems. 😦 ) I can’t find a copy of the SAPS online, so I don’t know if it clearly distinguishes romantic and sexual preferences, or doesn’t as in Bogaert’s metric, but it’s still already higher than 1% at least in the college population.

Two reasons why surveying for asexuality is hard

1) Asexuality is an umbrella term

The asexual label includes a lot of different identities. Most people think of “intimate relationships” as a single concept, the point you happen to be at on the relationship escalator.

But actually they’re two things (tumblr calls this the “split attraction model”):

splitattraction

Although, even more realistically, it’s more of a smorgasbord:

smorgasbord.jpg

A great deal of people are either aromantic but sexual, or asexual but romantic. This means that they’re grabbing some of the dishes from the “romance” side and almost none from the “sexual” side, or vice versa. I think this is tough because the romantic/sexual distinction isn’t very clear if you haven’t thought about it before. Our culture describes cuddling as foreplay, and that all relationships move on an escalator from dating to sex to marriage to babies. But while Clickhole tells us that kissing is sex, many aces will clarify that there is, in fact, a big difference between all of these things.

This is complicated in many cases:

  • Later in the above survey, when Bogaert calls kissing, cuddling, and sexual intercourse all “experiences of a sexual kind.” (To be fair, this could also be due to a shift in the meaning of the word “sexual”.)
  • When a survey asks if the reader is “heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual”, and that’s the only question about sexual or romantic orientation. (Which one does a romantic ace choose? Does the survey-maker know about the split-attraction model? Aren’t their meaningful relationships more important than their hypothetical sex life?)
  • When a survey asks about one kind of behavior, like not having a libido, and assumes that this means the same thing as asexual.
  • Asexuality is usually assumed to be a personal preference, but if you’re raised in a culture that says Not Having Sex Is Good And Virtuous, you’re more likely to think that you don’t want sex if you also think of yourself as Good And Virtuous.

2) Most people don’t know what asexuality is

By way of analogy, let’s imagine a world where food intolerances exist but are completely unknown and unaddressed. If you eat a sandwich every day for lunch and get sick every afternoon, you’re probably going to… keep eating sandwiches. You’re not going to think “hey, maybe I’m gluten intolerant,” or even, “maybe I should try eating something different for lunch?” You might notice that on a day you skip lunch, you don’t feel sick, but you’re going to keep eating sandwiches – a sandwich is as good a lunch as any, and you don’t have a framework for any counter-evidence.

This is hermeneutic injustice, also known as “why didn’t anyone tell me that there was a word for that?” In our world, asexuality is, of course, a known concept – but it’s not well known or accepted enough for everybody to be able to know if they are or aren’t that.

For instance:

  • There’s a great deal of societal pressure to date, get married, have sex, etc., and people might do these without really wanting to. And then say “well, of course I have a sex drive, I mean, I’m married, after all,” never noticing that their beliefs are circular.
  • The typical mind fallacy means ace people may assume that everybody thinks the same way they do about sex or romance, and date people anyways.
  • People may have heard the word “asexual”, but not understand that, e.g., you can be romantic and asexual, or that it’s not only a trauma response or medical symptom, or that you can have a high libido and be asexual.
  • If you haven’t heard of people who are happy not having sex, you probably haven’t considered that you might be happy not having sex.
  • This diagnostic criterion from the 2013 DSM-5 for Female Sexual Interest/Arousal disorder (also present for male hypoactive sexual disorder.) While it’s nice that asexual identity is no longer pathologized the same way it was so very long ago as 2012, it’s also a useless exception if people don’t know what asexuality is.

DSM-2.jpg

I subscribe to Ozy’s view of identity labels as being about communicating preferences. So the question I’d like to be able answer is “how many people are there who either identify as asesxual, or would find it useful given the societal leeway to do so?”

Alternatively, asexuality is also commonly described as “lack of sexual attraction to other people”. There’s certainly room for nuance there, but it’s still pretty useful.

Behavior-based surveys

Because of the above, I’d like to explore options other than asking “are you asexual?” and scaling up.

One thing that seems to work well in sociology is asking about behavior, not self-identifiers. For instance, asking men if they are gay will get you one answer. Asking men if they sometimes have sex with other men gets a larger pool – perhaps they’re closeted, bisexual, used to identify as gay, or regularly have ‘bud sex’ with their guy pals but identify as straight. Self identification is hard, behavior is a little more straightforward.

Because asexuality is an umbrella term, asking about behavior is difficult. The Asexuality Identification Scale (AIS) seems to be our answer – researchers came up with a bunch of question about attitudes towards sex (EG: “My ideal relationship would not involve sexual activity, 0 (disagree strongly) – 5 (agree strongly)”), gave them to ace-identified participants from the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, and chose the most predictive ones. 93% of these subjects got a score above 40 on the resulting 12-item questionnaire (the questions are available here.)

This seems pretty good to me. People who hang around AVEN aren’t necessarily representative of the larger ace population, and they’re selected for knowing that they’re asexual, but it is a popular central message board for ace people, and acknowledges (and presumably contains) ace people of a variety of different stripes. So I feel reasonably comfortable saying that if respondents answer honestly, this scale will catch most (~90%) of the ace or potentially ace people.

(Answering the questions honestly is tricky, though. I suspect that many people who are asexual but haven’t realized it yet will lean towards the sexual end of the test scores, and won’t after realizing it. I suppose the way to test this is to ask an enormous number of people to take the test, then have them do it again five years later, and see if any of them have started identifying as asexual in the meantime.)

In coming up with the questions for this quiz, they compared the 176 asexual participants to 716 non-ace participants, recruited off of Craigslist / psychology research websites / their university study pool. Of those, 4% scored above 40.

This could be read as the false positive of the test. I would like to offer a counter proposal: This is closer to the baseline rate of asexuality in the general population. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody else has given this survey to a large random sample group.

One reason this might not represent reality is because it seems possible that advertising for the study mentioned that it was a study on sexual behaviors, and I imagine a lot of people closer to the asexual end of the smorgasbord would say “nope, not really my area of expertise” and move on, leaving them under-represented in the quiz. Alternatively, maybe they’d think “well, I appear to have a different relationship with sex than other people I know, so I should take this survey”, and they’d be over-represented. I don’t know how the survey was presented.

Designing better surveys

If you’re making a survey and really only care about people’s self-identified sexuality, you can still do better than most people!

Clearly distinguishing romance and sex

The 2014 AVEN community survey found that only 20% of asexual-identified survey respondents also identified as aromantic. If the survey respondents (mostly people from tumblr, as well as regular AVEN community members) is representative, this might indicate that 4 out of 5 asexuals do have romantic interests.

There isn’t a website like AVEN specifically about aromanticism, and sexual aromantics seem unlikely to be on an asexuality website. So it’s also hard to say what percent of aromantic people are also asexual.

Better accounting for asexuals in survey questions

A website I follow did a participant demographic survey in 2014, then another participant demographic survey in 2016. Most of the questions were the same between the two, but at least one  changed: In 2014, the survey asked what the reader’s sexual orientation was. The results were:

  • Asexual: 59, 3.9%
  • Bisexual: 216, 14.4%
  • Heterosexual: 1133, 75.4%
  • Homosexual: 47, 3.1%
  • Other: 35, 2.3%

In tallying the data, Scott Alexander wrote: “[This question was poorly worded and should have acknowledged that people can both be asexual and have a specific orientation; as a result it probably vastly undercounted our asexual readers]”

  • In the 2016 survey, it asked about orientation. Then it asked if the reader was asexual.
  • Heterosexual: -5.000% 1640 70.400%
  • Homosexual: +1.300% 103 4.400%
  • Bisexual: +4.000% 428 18.400%
  • Other: +3.880% 144 6.180%

(The +/- represent changes from the 2014 survey.)

Are you asexual?

  • Yes: 171 7.4%
  • No: 2129 92.6%

I don’t think that we can necessarily assume that 7.4% of the general population is asexual, generalizing from the self-selected readers of one website. I do, however, want to draw your attention to the fact that reported rates of asexuality nearly doubled when the question was asked separately! I think this should be common practice in surveys collecting data on sexual orientation.

It could even be improved upon – someone who’s both gay and asexual might call themselves homoromantic, but not homosexual – but I think it’s a good starting ground. Our hypothetical respondent is more likely to choose “homosexual” on the grounds that it’s partially right, and that their asexuality will be acknowledged in the next question.

A “check all that apply” box is another possible solution.

Conclusion

Limitations % of population that is asexual
Bogaert From 2004, didn’t distinguish romantic/sexual orientation. 1%
Kinsey From 1953, may not have distinguished romantic/sexual orientation. Not necessarily random. ~5.5-7.8% (1.5-2% of men, 9.5-13.5% of women)
Nurius From 1983, may not have distinguished romantic/sexual orientation. Of mostly college students. 7.5% (5% of men, 10% of women)
Asexual Identification Score control group Not necessarily completely representative. 4%
University of California system survey Of college students and staff/faculty. 4.6%

(While the LessWrong reader survey was non-random (with a decidedly young/liberal/male/white/tech-y bent), at 7.4% self-identified asexual readers, it’s interesting to note that it lines up with some of the higher bound estimates for the general population.)

I feel pretty comfortable saying that 1-8% of the population is asexual, maybe closer to 4-8%. If I had a lot of money to put toward this right now, I would have some college students give the Asexual Identification Scale to a large random sample of people, and be more confident in their answer as the correct one.

Check back soon for practical ideas on making your data collection more representative of asexual populations.

The bipartisan model of androgynous gender presentation

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[Content warning: Talking about ways that people automatically gender other people. If this is a tough topic for you, be careful. Also, a caveat that I’m talking descriptively, not prescriptively, about people’s unconscious and instant ways of determining gender, and not A) what they might actually think about someone’s gender, and certainly not B) what anyone’s gender actually is.

Nonetheless, if I got anything wildly or offensively inaccurate, please do let me know.]

When you try and figure out a stranger’s gender, you don’t just use one physical trait – you observe a variety of traits, mentally assign them all evidence weights, compare them to any prior beliefs you might have on the situation, and then – usually – your brain spits out a “man!” or “woman!” This is mostly unconscious and happens in under a second.

This is called “Bayesian reasoning” and it’s really cool that your brain does it automatically. Most people have some male, some female, and some neutral signals going on. ‘Long hair’ is usually a female signal, but if it’s paired with a strong jawline, heavy brows, and a low voice on someone who’s 6’5”, you’ll probably settle on ‘male’. Likewise, ‘wearing a suit’ is usually a pretty good male signal, but if the person is wearing makeup and is working at a hotel where everyone is wearing suits, you’re more likely to think ‘female’.

Then there are people with androgynous gender presentations – the people who you look at and your brain stumbles, or else does spit out an answer, but with doubt. (As a cis but not-particularly-gender-conforming woman, this is people around me all the time.) When people are read as ‘androgynous’, I think they’re doing three possible things:

  1. Strong male and female signals. Think a dress and a beard, or a high-pitched voice and being 6’4” and muscular, or wearing a suit and eyeliner. Genderfuck is an aesthetic that goes for this.

Left: Drag queen Conchita Wurst. Right: Game of Thrones character Brienne of Tarth.

2) No gender signals. Not giving gender cues, or trying to fall in the middle of any that exist on a spectrum. I think of this one as usually involving de-emphasized secondary sex characteristics – flat chest, no facial hair – which might also mean a youthful, neotenous look. Or maybe a voice or hips or height or whatever that’s sort of in the middle. Some (but not all!) androgynous models have something like this going on.

Left: Model Natacha S. Right: Zara’s Ungendered fashion line.

Fashion-wise, every now and then a company that rolls out a gender-neutral clothing line is criticized because all the clothing is baggy, formless, and vaguely masculine. (See comments below on why this may be.) I think these bland aesthetics are going for ‘No Signals’ – baggy clothing conceals secondary sex characteristics, the plain colors call to mind sort of a blank slate.

3) Signals for Something Else. For a trait that would normally signal gender, signal something else entirely. Long hair is for women, short hair is for men, but a green mohawk isn’t either of those. You might speak in a high-pitched voice, or a low-pitched voice, or in falsetto with an accent. Men wear pants, women wear dresses, but nobody wears this:

Pictured: I don’t know what these people are signalling, but it’s sure not a binary gender. [New York Fashion Week, 2015.]

What does this imply?

I’m not sure.

I expect that people who do No Signals get less shit from bigots (harassment, violence, weird looks) than people in the other two categories (Mixed Signals or Signaling Something Else.) I would imagine that bigots are more likely to figure that No Signals people are clearly a binary gender that they just can’t read, whereas Mixed Signals people are perceived as intentionally going against the grain.

This is unfortunate, because if you want to be read as androgynous, it’s way easier to just do Mixed Signals than to conceal secondary sex characteristics in order to do No Signals. (Especially if your secondary sex characteristics happen to be more pronounced.) Fortunately, society in general seems to be moving away from ‘instant gender reads are your real gender’, and towards ‘there are lots of different ways to do gender and gender presentation’.

Signaling Something Else people probably also get harassment and weird looks, but possibly more because they’re non-conforming in ways that don’t have to do with gender.

Male Bias in Gender Interpretation

Also! There is a known trend that suggests that people are more likely to read ambiguous traits as male than female. This is probably because ‘male’ is seen as ‘the default’, because culture. See: non-pet animals, objects other than cars and ships. This seems to have originally come from Kessler & McKenna (1978), and has held up in a few studies. I’m not sure if this rule is completely generalizable, but here’s a few things it might imply:

You may actually have to have more feminine traits than masculine ones to hit the Confusion Zone. For gender-associated traits that go on a spectrum – chest size, voice pitch, some metric of facial shape, etc., it might look like this:

graph1

Of course, there are also cases where people think a trait is associated with gender when, really, it’s not. That still might mean something like this:

14646614_10210490978858879_848724627_o

(See also.)

One conclusion I’ve heard drawn from this: This explains why it’s often harder for trans women to get automatically gendered correctly, than for trans men. A trans woman has to conceal or remove a lot of ‘male’ traits to get read as female. Trans men, meanwhile, don’t have to go as far to hit ‘male’.

Even gender distribution world

Let’s say there are 100 gendered traits (wearing a dress or pants, long or short hair, facial hair or no facial hair, etc.) Now let’s imagine a population where everybody in this population has the “male” or “female” version of each trait assigned independently and randomly. If the male-bias principle generalizes, you’re likely to read more than half of these people are male.

Regional differences?

Gender presentation, and thus how you read gender, is deeply rooted in culture! If you see someone in garb from a culture you’re not familiar with, and you can’t tell their gender, it’s quite possible that they’re still doing intentional gender signals – just not in a way you can read.

Even for similar cultures, this might be different. When I was in England, people called me ‘sir’ all the time. This doesn’t happen often in Seattle. I have three theories for why:

  1. People in England have different gendered trait distributions for deciding gender. Maybe in England, just seeing ‘tall’ + ‘short hair’ + ‘wearing a collared shirt’ is enough to tip the scale to ‘man.’
  2. Where I was in England was just more culturally conservative than Seattle, and if I spent more time in, say, small towns in Southern or Midwest US, I’d also be ‘sir’d’ more.
  3. People in England are more likely to say ‘sir’ or ‘m’am’ at all. So if you were to ask a bunch of Seattle and England strangers if I was a man or a woman, the same percent would say ‘man’, but I wouldn’t notice in Seattle.

I think 2 or 3 are more likely, but 1 would be interesting as well.

Post Notes

  • Ben Hoffman pointed out that this maps to classifications for people who don’t consistently vote for a major political party. Mixed Signals people are like swing voters or nonpartisan voters. No Signals people are political moderates or don’t vote at all. Signaling Something Else people are, like, anarchists. Or Pirate Party members.
  • The Bayesian Evidence model of gender identification doesn’t only apply when the result is inconclusive – often your brain will, say, match someone as ‘man’, but also observe that they’re doing some non-masculine things.

(The first thing to consider in this case is that your brain may be wrong, and they may not actually be a man at all.)

  • Anyways, what gender people are and what they signal to the world is more complex than an instantaneous read, and this is an important distinction. For instance, even when people look at me and think ‘woman’, they can tell that I’m not doing standard femininity either.
  • If you’re trying to cultivate auto-gendering people less often, I suspect that training your subconscious to quickly separate whatever traits from gender would be useful. Finding efficient ways to do this is left as an exercise to the reader.
  • It’s obviously possible to train your brain to look at someone and mentally assign them a gender other than the instantaneous response. I’ve also heard stories of people looking at people and automatically going “nonbinary”. I suspect that if you grew up in binary-gendered society, as so many of us tragically did, this is a thing you developed later in life. Maybe you learned this as a possible answer to the “confusion on gendering androgynous people” brain-state.