Prevalence of Sexual Orientation Across 28 Nations and Its Association with Gender Equality, Economic Development, and Individualism

Abstract

The prevalence of women’s and men’s heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality was assessed in 28 nations using data from 191,088 participants from a 2005 BBC Internet survey. Sexual orientation was measured in terms of both self-reported sexual identity and self-reported degree of same-sex attraction. Multilevel modeling analyses revealed that nations’ degrees of gender equality, economic development, and individualism were not significantly associated with men’s or women’s sexual orientation rates across nations. These models controlled for individual-level covariates including age and education level, and nation-level covariates including religion and national sex ratios. Robustness checks included inspecting the confidence intervals for meaningful associations, and further analyses using complete-cases and summary scores of the national indices. These analyses produced the same non-significant results. The relatively stable rates of heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality observed across nations for both women and men suggest that non-social factors likely may underlie much variation in human sexual orientation. These results do not support frequently offered hypotheses that sexual orientation differences are related to gendered social norms across societies.