#gc2024

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The 2024 survey is now closed!

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Who? Everyone whose gender doesn’t tidily fit into the female/male binary. (Oceania participants isolated) What? An online survey asking participants how they describe themselves and how they would like other people to refer to them. When? May to June 2024. Oceania Participants: 2,457 Worldwide Summary: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2024-worldwide-summary/ Full Oceania Report: [GC2024] Analysis of Oceania’s results from the Gender Census

Q1. Identity words The Top 5 were:

nonbinary: 57.6% (down 1.7% from last year)

queer: 51.6% (down 1.2%)

trans: 42.8% (down 1.4%)

a person / human / [my name] / “I’m just me”: 37.3% (down 1.4%)

transgender: 37.0% (down 2.4%)

Q2. Titles Titles (with name) Here’s the top 5:

No title at all: 37.0% (up 2.6% from last year)

Mx: 22.8% (up 0.5%)

Mr: 10.5% (down 1.4%)

Ms: 6.7% (down 0.9%)

Miss: 6.7% (up 1.6%)

Titles (without name) The top 5:

No title at all: 66.5% (down 3.8%)

Friend: 29.5% (up 2.0%)

Sir: 28.2% (down 5.0%)

Comrade: 20.7% (new to the checkbox this year)

Mx: 20.3% (down 1.1%)

Q3. Pronouns The top five pronouns (or lack thereof) are:

They - they/them/their/theirs/themself: 75.7% (up 0.6% from last year)

He - he/him/his/his/himself: 40.5% (down 1.5%)

She - she/her/her/hers/herself: 37.2% (up 5.0%)

It - it/it/its/its/itself: 21.4% (up 1.5%)

Avoid pronouns / use name as pronoun: 13.0% (up 1.1%)

Q4. Family/relationship terms Here’s the top 5:

[nickname based on my first name]: 30.6%

[my first name]: 25.6%

Questioning or unknown: 22.1%

Mum: 21.2%

Dad: 21.1%

Who? Everyone whose gender doesn’t tidily fit into the female/male binary.

What? An online survey asking participants how they describe themselves and how they would like other people to refer to them.

When? May to June 2024.

Participants: 48,645

The full report: click here

Raw data and summary tables: Google Sheets:

Unprocessed responses

Processed responses – warning, this will take a long time to load!

2013-2024 trends

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Identity words

The top five were:

nonbinary: 60.4% (down 2.7%)

queer: 53.6% (down 1.2%)

trans: 44.7% (down 2.0%)

a person / human / [my name] / "I'm just me": 39.1% (down 3.4%)

transgender: 38.8% (down 1.5%)

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Titles

The top 5 were:

No title at all: 42.2% (up 2.1%)

Mx: 17.4% (down 1.3%)

Mr: 11.3% (down 0.2%)

Non-gendered professional/academic title: 9.2% (down 0.2%)

Ms: 5.8% (up 0.3%)

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Pronouns

Here’s the top 5:

They – they/them/their/theirs/themself: 75.5% (up 1.0% on last year)

He – he/him/his/his/himself: 42.0% (down 0.5%)

She – she/her/her/hers/herself: 36.0% (up 3.3%)

It – it/it/its/its/itself: 20.3% (up 0.9%)

Avoid pronouns / use name as pronoun: 13.9% (up 0.7%)

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Edit log

Here's an exciting graph, to show that I am working on this year's Gender Census report. :D

This one shows that they/them popularity is moving at the speed of time - the popularity curve among age groups moves by about one year per year. This suggests that liking they/them is a sticky trend connected to age.

But also, older age groups are warming to it ahead of schedule - the appeal is spreading oldwards, but apparently not youngwards.

I am… not a statistician, linguist or sociologist of any kind, and I apologise to everyone for my extremely weird explanation.

Edit: By popular request of one person (@ophrys-apifera), a slightly different arrangement:

I'm curious if you noticed a drop in people entering multi-set entries this year. (Ie. entering a set that goes 'star/void/stars/voids/starself' instead of one for 'star' and one for 'void'.)

Unfortunately, there's no way for me to automate looking for those, and it's way too much for me to sort through manually, so I do not know! I am sorry about that.

That's the first thought I had when I saw the unwieldy question of doom - 'maybe this will reduce people's need to enter pre-alternating pronoun sets.'

Very interesting thought!

I'm not sure it's because people were entering fewer overall, or your questions are improving, but the pronoun data looks a bit cleaner this year.

I didn't change the pronoun questions themselves at all this year, so I cannot take the credit - good work everyone! :D

You can find it, the report without an Appendix (Which cuts down the page count significantly), past reports, and the summary here: Google Drive Folder

Or just click below for the full Oceania report:

The country stats are looking quite impressive! Unfortunately, the US is still representing over half of the survey participants. It's difficult to get the survey as noticed in other places and some of us are not doing very crash hot in the percentage of population either. (*Cough* Aus coming up the end of English-Speaking and the gap between them and the UK *cough*)

NZ/Aotearoa has reached the goal I had in mind, overtaking Prefer not to say by a comfortable margin.

Aus still sits about 300 less than Germany. I'm starting to leave flyers places and encouraging friends again to share around. So hoping that helps give us a boost.

Over 30s are now at 19.2%! Which is really cool to see that number rise. I'm trying to figure out more places to share with a large portion of that age range but as someone in their early twenties, I'm often out of the range for a lot of those social groups.