More Gen Z women moving away from heterosexuality, study shows
A group of young women (Getty Images, stock)
A new study has shown that more and more Gen Z women are moving away from heterosexuality and identifying as LGBTQ+.
Researchers for The Conversation have been tracking patterns in their Human Sexualities Research Lab since 2011. In a recent study, they asked whether “young women and men are changing in similar ways across three measures of sexual orientation”.
The three measures included sexual attraction, sexual behaviour and self-identification. “Our findings suggest they are not,” the report states.
“In our analysis, this gender gap is not only about who claims an LGBTQ+ identity; it is also about how the boundaries of heterosexuality are changing.”
The report, published on 7 July, cites a poll carried out by Gallup in 2023, which found that Gen Z women are almost three times more likely to identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community than Gen Z men.
The poll also showed that the number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled since 2012. In 2023, 28.5 percent of Gen Z women said they identified as LGBTQ+, compared to just 10.6 percent of men.
For their report, the Conversation’s researchers examined 15 years’ worth of responses from more than 10,000 public university undergraduates in the state of New York between 2011 and 2026.
Gen Z women almost three times more likely to identify as LGBTQ+
They also looked at more than 700 responses from students from 2024 to 2025 that explained why they chose their sexual identities.
The Conversation’s research found that young women have steadily become less likely to report being exclusively attracted to the other sex across the last 15 years. In 2011, 22 percent of the women surveyed said their attraction was not exclusively to men, but that figure rose to almost 50 percent by 2026.
Around eight percent of women reported that they did not exclusively have male sexual partners in 2011, while 35 percent reported the same in 2026. The portion of those that identified as something other than heterosexual rose from 18 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2026.
The report also notes that the figures remained “broadly consistent across racial groups”.
On the flip side, men of the same demographic showed “no comparable long-term shift and instead remained concentrated in exclusive heterosexuality”.
The portion of men who reported that their sexual attraction was not exclusively to women actually dropped from around 14 percent to 13 percent from 2011 to 2026.
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