According to countless popular media articles, there is a massive disparity between heterosexual men and women when it comes to giving oral sex. Some of these articles suggest that, in male-female sexual encounters, “blowjobs are basically a given” while cunnilingus is “one of the least-often performed sex acts.” In other words, men are getting oral all the time from women, whereas women are almost never receiving it from men—a situation that has been dubbed the “oral sex gap.”

However, I did some digging into the prevalence of oral sex across genders and it turns out that these claims don’t quite match up with what the research says. The oral sex gap isn’t exactly what we have been led to believe.

Before we get into what the numbers say, I should mention that many of the media articles lamenting the “oral sex gap” cite the same study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. They claim this study shows that “women are twice as likely to go down on their partners than men” [1].

This claim has been repeated in multiple articles and, undoubtedly, it sounds like a big gap—however, that’s not what this research actually found. In fact, in this study (which focused on heterosexual, Canadian college students), a majority of both women (59%) and men (52%) reported giving oral sex during their most recent sexual encounter. In other words, women were more likely to report giving oral than men, but it’s nowhere near the size of the difference claimed in the popular media.

So where did that erroneous claim come from? I suspect it’s because the authors of those media articles honed in on another finding from this study, which is that while 10% of men said they gave but didn’t receive oral the last time they had sex, 26% of women said the same thing. So women were more than twice as likely to give but not receive oral compared to men—however, that’s not the same as saying that “women are twice as likely to go down on their partners than men.”

While this study does suggest the presence of at least a moderately-sized oral sex gap, we should avoid drawing too many conclusions from a single study of college students. So let’s take a look at data from a nationally representative U.S. sex survey, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior [2].

In the table below, you can see the prevalence of oral sex behaviors in the past year separately for men and women in different age ranges.