In a recent survey among 13 to 20-year-old Americans, researchers found Generation Z to be far more queer than millennials. According to the study, which was conducted by J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group, 52 percent of Gen Zs identify as anything but straight while 48 percent identify as straight.
Broadly reports: On a scale of zero to six, where zero signified “completely straight” and six meant “completely homosexual,” more than a third of the young demographic chose a number between one and five, indicating that they were bisexual to some degree. Only 24 percent of their older counterparts identified this way.
Shepherd Laughlin, the director of trendspotting at J. Walter Thompson said, “We did a survey of Gen Z for a report released in May 2015 and found that 81 percent said that gender doesn’t define a person as much as it used to.”
Related: Half of Britain’s Young Men Say They’re Not Straight
“That was an intriguing statistic that got a lot of attention in the media, but we weren’t sure quite what it meant: Were they just saying, for example, that men or women could pursue any career they wanted to? Or did this reflect the more radical idea that gender itself isn’t as important to personal identity as it used to be, or that gender shouldn’t be seen as a binary? This new research shows that the latter idea is gaining significant traction among Gen Zers.”
In an interview with Broadly, Laughlin said he was 90 percent confident in the results. He added, “That was an intriguing statistic that got a lot of attention in the media, but we weren’t sure quite what it meant: Were they just saying, for example, that men or women could pursue any career they wanted to? Or did this reflect the more radical idea that gender itself isn’t as important to personal identity as it used to be, or that gender shouldn’t be seen as a binary? This new research shows that the latter idea is gaining significant traction among Gen Zers.”
The complete results of the study were released at a SXSW session entitled “Generation Z and Gender: Beyond Binaries?”
