How not-straight is Imperial?
Sexuality, gender expression and Imperial demographics
Gender and sexual orientation
The average responder is a male, heterosexual undergraduate in their early 20s. But that does not mean that Imperial altogether is white, male and undergraduate. The DEI department would have greatly failed otherwise.
Three-quarters of Imperial men are straight, while only half of the female respondents are. The largest share of non-binary respondents are bisexual.
30% of females are bisexual
We were happy to learn that 39 non-binary people answered the survey, allowing us to use their answers for statistical analysis.
Overall, 57% of Imperial is heterosexual, 20% bisexual, 4.2% gay, 3.2% lesbian, 4.0% questioning, 2.3% pansexual and 2.3% asexual. A small fraction, 0.82%, expressed that they were something we had not listed.
Gender expression
85% of Imperial is cisgender and 3.9% of our respondents are transgender. Females and males are 92% and 91% cisgender respectively, and 2.5% and 0.66% are transgender, respectively. For non-binary people, 15% are cisgender, and 59% are transgender.
As we learned about these percentages, we were happy to learn that Imperial is not just pink or blue, but rather a wonky version of the rainbow. Life would be boring if everyone was straight.
Undergrad, Postgrad or Alum?
Regardless of whether people were looking out for the Sex Survey or just happened to come across it, 80% of respondents were undergraduates, with no other education level even close to that number. We are happy to learn that 45 alumni still responded to the survey and we hope to score many more in the future.
How many sexual partners have you had?
The average Imperial student has had five partners. This differs by gender, with female students averaging four partners, male students five and non-binary respondents seven.
Department
Due to an imbalance in the Felix marketing strategy, more Physics students responded to the survey than any other department: twice the second-largest group, Medicine students. Nonetheless, most departments had more than 30 students respond and these were then considered for percentage-based statistics. It would be unfair to report that 50% of the Centre for Environmental Policy is transgender when only two people answered the survey.
The top five departments who responded to the survey were Physics (16% of the responses), Medicine (9%), Life Sciences (7%), Bioengineering (6%), Chemistry (6%), Mathematics (6%) and Mechanical Engineering (6%). All other departments made up less than 5% of all the responses.
53% of responses were male, 39% female and 5% non-binary. The per-department split is below.
