Within the span of 3 days, the survey for LGBT gamers/nerds received 483 responses. Here’s a link to the survey that they took.

Statistically speaking, my penis was fully erect from having access to so much data.

I was incredibly excited that we were able to receive such a large range of answers from people. Here is the basic rundown of the demographics of the quiz takers:

I am kind of scared and thrilled at the prospect of debunking or confirming certain myths about LGBT nerds but I am telling you to take the results with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism. Before I get to any analyses, I need to write this disclaimer:

This is not a scientific study and I do not claim it to be so. I understand that the quiz structure and the questions were not structured or worded optimally to achieve the most unbiased answers. Also, the answers given are heavily dependent on the honesty and knowledge of the quiz taker. The only thing that I can promise you is that I will, to the best of my knowledge, interpret the results as statistically accurate as I can and reference legitimate studies where I can. Raw data and raw percentages will be given once I’ve analyzed everything properly at the end of the series and I have scrubbed the results of bad data.

Also, the quiz consists of takers who have access to the internet so this naturally skews the results towards people who can afford a computer or have access to one.

First things first. We need to test that we can trust our numbers statistically. At the time that this article was written, there are 316, 489, 500 people in the US according to the US census website.  According to the Williams Institute of UCLA, 11% of the population  acknowledge at least some same-sex sexual attraction. In order to achieve 95% confidence level with a margin of error of 5% for an LGBT population of 34,813,845, we’d need a sample size of at least 384 so we more than achieved that.  Without further ado, our first myth.

Common Nerd Myth: The Virgin

This survey was not originally meant to measure this so I had to interpret the results a bit. If a person answered that they were Virgin or did not know what they liked in both questions about sex, I counted them as a virgin.

• According to the National Health Statistics report published by the CDC on March 2011,  87% of heterosexual male and females in the US have had vaginal or oral sex by age 24.
• By our results, 94% have had some form of sexual contact or know their preference by age 20. 6% of all our respondents above the age of 20 did not know their preference or demeanor during sex.

The result is well within our margin of error. This seems to suggest that more LGBT nerds have had at least one sexual experience compared to the population mean. I can’t conclude anything for certain without having better worded questions or a survey dedicated to sex but the results are very surprising.

It is a common stereotype that LGBT people are more sexual than heterosexual people though so this is not unexpected. But, how do LGBT nerds compare to the gay population?

•  According to a UK study of 16,000 gay men in 2002, around 30% of gay men have not had a sexual experience by age 17.
• According to our survey, only 13% of respondents above age 17 are still virgin or do not know their preferences

Say what? This actually confused me even more. The survey is suggesting that LGBT nerds as a whole experience these rites of passage at higher percentages than either heterosexuals or homosexuals.  Is it a cultural thing? Is it a time thing? The results were expected to be skewed because of the structure of my questions and answers but if anything, the results of the study is weighted towards having more virgins because someone who did not know their preferences or demeanor would be counted as a virgin. Do LGBT nerds get it on much earlier? Were the test takers listing their preferences/fantasies without actually having sex? Perhaps the 10 year time difference and geographical difference can account for the large percentage difference. Or, the people who took the test are just filthy filthy liars. I’m not quite sure. Either way, food for thought.

Common Nerd Myth: The Awkward Wallflower

In order to test this, I asked for people’s Myer-Briggs Type Indicator. It’s a bit of pop psychology but this was the quickest way to ascertain people’s behaviors without having a very lengthy quiz about personality. Unsurprisingly, a large amount of people did not know what this test was so the results we got aren’t as significant as our results above. Not only that but certain types are more likely to know their MBTI. Also, within the first 63 respondents, INTJ was not an option so the number of INTJ respondents should be lower than it normally would be. But, here are the basic results:

Here are the adjusted percentages compared to the normal distribution

As a whole, LGBT nerds are 76% introverted while the normal population is 51% introverted. This conforms to the stereotype. Perhaps even more damning is that despite the artificially lower number of INTJ personality types from the question mistake, they still comprised the majority of our test takers. INTJ people are the logical and factual people so this only makes sense that they would be more likely to seek out knowledge or know their MBTI indicator. It also makes sense why they would self identify as nerds.

But is the awkward part true? 81% of our respondents are of the N preference when encountering problems as opposed to the 27% of the main population. This means that they are more likely to try to read between the lines during social situations. Whether that can lead towards “awkward” situations is up for debate.

As a whole though, the numbers seem to conform to the stereotype that the majority of nerds would rather read a book or have alone time than go out to the club.

I’ll continue to post results throughout the next couple of weeks. There’s a lot of data to go through and sort. Stay tuned on our Facebook Page and our Twitter for more updates and articles on this.

Discuss this article on our forums

Tags: extroverts, gay-nerds, introvert, lgbt nerds, mbti, meyer-briggs, statistics, survey results, virgin, wallflowers