Source: By Another Believer - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33277642

Although research reveals more women than men identify as a sexual minority, it also documents that only a small proportion of these women, perhaps no more than 1% of women in the general population, identify as lesbian. In my research on development among sexual-minority individuals I have experienced this dearth of lesbians, first when enlisting lesbians during my initial research in the mid-1980s, even though half of my recruitment team was composed of lesbian/bisexual women. In my lab’s most recent research, we easily filled cells for straight men and women, bisexual women, and gay men. Far more difficult has been recruiting lesbians (and bisexual men).

Other scholars have confided that they, too, face this dilemma. Their solution has been to either broaden the definition of “lesbian” to include “mostly lesbian” and “bisexual women” or use lesbian organizations or snowball methodology (participants recruiting their friends) to solicit lesbian-identified women. Neither of these approaches are ideal.

But more importantly, why so few lesbians?

In her research over the past several decades, Dr. Lisa Diamond has also pondered this issue, leading her to conclude, “Completely exclusive same- attractions are less common in women than men.” As to why, she proposed plausible cultural and biological pathways.

Cultural Reasons

Dr. Diamond reminds us that around the world, women’s “economic and social livelihood has historically depended on their sexual availability to men.” The result has been a loss of sexual autonomy for women.

“They are rarely encouraged to or to experiment sexually, not only because of sexual norms in the Western world, but because of the universal risk of and the value placed on virginity. So women don’t grow up prioritizing their sexual impulses and feelings the way that men do, and they learn to base their sexual response on the response of the partner.”

Thus, women who have an exclusive same-sex orientation are “set up by culture to remain open to attractions to men” and to those they are emotionally close to.

Biological Reasons

Researchers such as Dr. Margaret Rosario, Dr. Cage Hall, and Dr. Kim Wallen agree with Dr. Diamond as to potential biological sex differences in an “intrinsic erotic orientation” that lead to differences in women’s and men’s sexual response. As to Dr. Rosario’s questions, “Why would nature give us such a disparity? What fitness implications would it have for survival?” Dr. Diamond suggests:

“Maybe in humans, females just happen to be the more bisexual sex. I imagine that from an evolutionary perspective, the key environmental ‘pressure’ on which sex is more bisexual has to do with which sex controls the process… It makes sense for the ‘sexually powerful’ sex to be the one that is more rigid and targeted in its sexual impulses; in humans, men are the sexually powerful sex, meaning that they play a greater role in determining when and whether sex occurs. As long as one sex is ‘targeted,’ then there’s no real evolutionary pressure for the other to be strongly targeted, and as Dr. Meredith Chivers has argued, it might make sense for females to be more ‘arousable’ to a wide range of stimuli.”

From Dr. Diamond’s perspective, the “weird” thing that requires explanation is not the lack of lesbians but the exclusive, monosexual attractions of men, straight and gay.

Conclusion

Few of us are surprised by the low number of lesbians because, as Dr. Wallen wrote, it is “what one would expect if the sexual arousal system in women is more fluid, whereas men’s is more binary. If one is attracted to both sexes what is the likelihood that they would then choose one sex to identify with?”

If they are right, then you’d expect women to one, be more likely than men to identify as something other than exclusively straight or lesbian/gay (e. ., bisexual) and to two, have sexual relations with their less preferred sex. But what if these two assumptions are not true? First, in my next post we’ll hear from Stephanie, a young adult I interviewed who turned from bisexuality (her ) to identify as lesbian.