There were a few comments that indicated the survey marginalized some individuals and we would like to state for the record that we are sorry. We crafted the survey over the course of a few nights and a few conversations with different friend groups. Not everyone in these groups was heterosexual, but like most things in society, these individuals definitely outnumbered all other sexualities. We definitely should have been more cognizant of such a bias.
Having said that, when we went to deal with the results of the survey, we struggled with what to do for underrepresented sexual orientations and genders.
Tables 1 and 2 show the raw numbers of responses for gender and sexual orientation, respectively. Even when we grouped all “other” (asexual, other, and pansexual) responses into one category, we simply could not produce any reasonable analysis out of the results.
This put us in an awkward position. We did not want to marginalize these groups further by cutting them out of our analysis entirely, but it also seemed offensive to try to analyze data about a group of what amounted to fifteen people. Every time we tried to include this data, it looked absurd or misrepresented the results of the survey. We just could not bring ourselves to publish statistics about such an unreliably small sample size.
Table 1: The number of responses from each gender.
Table 2: The number of responses from each sexual orientation categorized by gender.
While we did not marginalize under represented groups further, we also did not want to further entrench the problem by publishing data that misrepresented these groups. Maybe we are wrong about this though and if you think so, send us an email. We are ready and willing to change our minds. Additionally, once we publish the results you are welcome to try to find a better way to analyze this data.
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