DISCLAIMER: In no way is this survey a comprehensive, or even good picture of sexual habits of students at uWaterloo. I’ve got sample bias, response bias, my own biases, and I made this survey in my 35-degree sauna for a room.

MAIN FINDINGS

This survey was overwhelmingly answered by men of 19-21 years who were in either math or engineering (43%).

The majority of students have had sex

You are more likely to have sex if you are older, and/or a woman*

The majority of students are sleeping with other students from uWaterloo, and from within their own faculties

Long term relationships were more likely in Science and Arts

* 106 women responded, which is about 1/5 of the survey.

I received a lot more responses than I expected, 495 total. Once I cleaned the data of “I fucked your mom” responses and others like it that number went down to 486.

I ask some questions and make some suggestions on why the charts turned out the way they did further below. Again though, this was just for fun and to satisfy my curiosity, it’s not a well vetted analysis. Just me making some guesses at stuff.

Basic Demographics

These are all self-explanatory.

Note about Gender and Sexuality

I tried to be inclusive in the survey. However, a relatively low number of people were trans, gay, bi, pan, or other. I didn’t analyze that data very much because of this. It wasn’t just that there weren’t enough people who sat outside “the norm” (11% of respondents were not heterosexual and that is significant!) but I became worried with the personal nature of the responses people could become identifiable. I also excluded the few people who were 16 and below for the same reason.

The big questions

These charts are just the basic answers to all the “touchy” questions. These charts speak for themselves as well.

Two variable charts – i.e. where things get interesting

Two things I really want to stress before you start to examine these graphs:

Please pay attention to what charts are in percentages and what charts are in counts. Every chart that analyzes by faculty is in percent because the overwhelming number of math and engineering students really throw things off visually. I would take whatever conclusions made about AHS and Environment with a grain of salt. Environment and AHS responses aren’t really worth examining closely since together they make up 5% of responses (AHS was 2% and Environment 3%). Science (10%) and Arts (11%) had a decent response rate. Even then though, if I wanted representative samples of the different faculties I’d need the following break down from the survey:

Faculty Full time % of total pop AHS 2378 7% ARTS 7768 24% ENG 7121 22% ENV 2466 8% MATH 7192 22% SCI 5568 17%

Those numbers are based on the information I grabbed from the performance indicators website for 2013/2014 enrollment. Clearly, as the graph in the basic demographics section showed, I don’t have anywhere close to these numbers in the survey.

Have you had sex by faculty, age and gender

This is by far the most interesting chart that I got out of the analysis.

I won’t lie, I was surprised to see Science had such a big gap, and that Arts was behind it. It was definitely not what I expected. Math and Engineering did more or less play out the way I thought they would though. This graph is interesting, but considering how haphazard this survey was, I really wouldn’t take any conclusions to heart on this.

The stronger indicator of if you had sex is your age, not your faculty it seems. Yes goes up, and no goes down with age.

This stays the same when you spilt for gender, although women were more likely overall to have sex.

So age seems to be a pretty strong indicator. Consider that 60% of respondents are between the ages of 19-21. Even with the majority of responses in that range you can still see the “No” responses going down as the “Yes” responses go up.

Who’s having sex with who?

As the pie chart earlier mentioned, we are mainly sleeping with people from our own school.

This doesn’t change much by faculty.

Or by gender really. Although I do think it’s worth noting that women are slightly more likely to have sex with others from the school, well it seems men were a little bit more likely to have sex with people outside of school. This could possibly speak to the higher ratio of men to women at Waterloo which according to the student head count is 56% male, and 44% female.

Additionally, not only are uWaterloo students more likely to have sex with a student from the school, they’re more likely to have had sex with someone from their own faculty. This surprised me a bit considering the gender inequalties of many of the faculties.

However, I still found the pattern I expected to find when I looked at gender. Women were more likely to have slept with someone from engineering or math (because of surplus of males?), while men had more distrbution. This isn’t the whole story though, since proximity could still matter more… 60% of women repondents were either in Math(33%) or Engineering(27%).

Sexual Habits – How often, and types of relationships

The first thing I should note about the two graphs below is a problem in the survey several people pointed out: no option for once a day, or more than once a day. There’s a good chance that some people chose the none of the above option, which I had put for people who either had not had sex or had sex very little. I argued if I should even bother charting this question, but I went for it anyways. It’s a pretty big caveat though so again… I wouldn’t draw any big conclusions here (or anywhere really).

How often students are having sex by faculty doesn’t seem to tell anything particularly interesting except that most faculties follow the same pattern of a less people having sex once week or less, and the majority having sex more than once a week or “none of the above”.

This chart is a little bit more interesting, as you can see the more than once a week climbs with age, just as it did with “have you had sex” results.

Now looking at who’s had long term relationships is pretty interesting. First it’s important to say that I’m operating under the assumption that people who have been in long term relationships are more likely to have had sex. That’s a pretty safe assumption to make considering the graph below.

When looking at types of relationships by faculty we see that Arts had the highest number of people respond with the catergories: Friends with Benefits, Complicated and Other. Science is second to them in this area but clearly has a large number of people who have been in long term relationships. Engineering and math did not have as high a number but instead were pretty even in their yes to no ratio. Engineering had 5% more people in long term relationships while Math had 7% less people in long term relationships. This graph leaves me with the following question: is it the course work or the gender balance (or both) in faculties that is creating these differences?

It could be that people in Math and Engineering don’t have as much time for relationships because of the heavy course load, or you could argue that they’re less capable of forging long lasting relationships because it’s difficult to find a partner in their faculty that would have the same interests as them seeing as proximity seems to play a significant role. It could be something else entirely, maybe the culture of those faculties just don’t encourage long term or other relationships options as much as others do. I’m just pondering here, I don’t think there’s anyway to gain a certain answer to these questions. I would enjoy hearing other peoples thoughts on them though.

Next, we have long term relationship by age, which proves once again that relationships, like sex, are more likely as you get older.

Finally, we have our graph on long term relationships by gender. Women were more likely to be in long term relationships, and have Friends with Benefits relationships, while men were more likely to have not been in a long term relationship.

That’s everything folks. Feel free to comment in the subreddit about any thoughts you have on the above. I’m welcome to constructive critcism (please don’t make me regret saying that) and any questions you have for me. If I did do this again I would do it much better next time so that I could draw conclusions I could be confident in.

For Reference: Survey Questions

An asterisk infront of the question means the question was required.

Questions 5 and below are where questions about sex start. Please use the definition of sex as anything from oral sex to anal sex, or sex with toys. I’m trying to make this survey as inclusive as possible.

* 1. What faculty are you in?

Engineering

Mathematics

Science

Applied Health Science

Arts Environment

Other (please specify)

* 2. Are you a graduate or undergraduate student?

Graduate

Undergraduate

* 3. What is your age?

16 or below

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25 or above

* 4. Gender?

Man

Woman

Transgender

Other (please specify)

* 5. Sexuality?

Heterosexual

Homosexual

Asexual

Bisexual

Other (please specify)

* 6. Have you had sex?

Yes

No

7. If you answered yes to question 6, was the person(s) a student? What school did they go to? Check all that apply.

University of Waterloo

Laurier

Conestoga

Guelph

Person was not a university student

Enter the name of any school(s) not listed above

8. If you have had sex with someone (or more than one person) from uWaterloo, what faculty are they in? Check all that apply.

Arts

Engineering

Mathematics

Environment

Science

Applied Health Science

Other (please specify)

9. How often are you having sex?

Once every three months

Once a month 2 – 4 times a month (but not once a week)

Once a week

More than once a week

None of the above

* 10. Are you in a relationship or have you ever been in a long term relationship while studying at uWaterloo? Consider long term as relationships of 3+ months.

Yes

No

Other (ex. “Friends with Benefits” or “it’s complicated”)