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Lies, Damned Lies, and Sexual Statistics
Romann M. WeberSeptember 21, 2008
You may have seen one of a number of news reports in the past few yearsthat reported on surveys of the sexual behavior of Americans. In particular,you may have seen lines such as this one: “Overall, women report an average of six sex partners in their lifetimes, men, 20” [1]. Now, if you’re a woman, maybeyou read this and thought to yourself, “Boy, men sure are dogs. No wonderthey can’t seem to commit to a relationship. They’re always off trying to findsomething to rub up against!” And if you’re a man, perhaps you thought thatyou have really underperformed relative to your fellow males.But did you stop to question the validity of the numbers? Maybe you leafedthrough the full survey results.
1
There are colorful graphs and some statisticalterminology. The conclusions must be legitimate, right? Not even close.Perhaps it
did 
occur to you that it seems strange for the average number of sexual partners for men to be so much larger than that for women. Shouldn’tthey be closer together? (Yes.) Should they be the same? (Not necessarily.)Why are the statistics so different? Well, people lie, especially about sex.To motivate our discussion a bit, let’s have a look at the chart below.
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http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/959a1AmericanSexSurvey.pdf 
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This is a matrix, of sorts, representing a hypothetical population of 20 menand 21 women. The sexual relationships among those in the group are indicatedby whether there is a numeral one in the cell that lies at the intersection of arow representing a male and a column representing a woman. For instance, wesee that male number 11 and female number 12 have gotten it on with eachother, whereas male 14 and female 14 have not known each other in the biblicalsense. Notice also that male number 12 is a virgin.Male number 10 is the stud in the group. We can see a lot of ones in his row,and we can see from the sum in the far-right column that male number 10 hasslept with more than half of the women in the population (over 57 percent, infact). You probably know how to compute an arithmetic average, which is justthe sum of all the numbers on a list divided by the total number of items on thatlist. To find the average number of partners for the men, we add the numbers inthe right-most column, which gives us the total number of sexual relationshipsfor all of the men.
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The average number of partners among the men is 3.0. Weuse the same idea to compute the average for the women, this time adding upthe numbers in the bottom row and dividing by the total number of women.The average number of partners among women is about 2.86.Notice that the sum of the relationships for the men is the same as the sumof the relationships for women, namely 60. This is
necessarily so
. After all,we can count up all of the ones on our table either row by row or column bycolumn. Either way, we should get the same answer. It also makes intuitivesense, since for a man to have a sexual relationship with a woman, it is requiredthat a woman have a sexual relationship with a man!This is going to be the case in any
complete
population under consideration:The total number of relationships will be the same for both the men and thewomen. The average can be a little different, however, because it is not neces-sarily the case that there are exactly as many men as there are women. I haven’tlooked it up, but for the purposes of the rest of this document, let us say thatthere are 51 percent women and 49 percent men in the American population. Ithink that is actually pretty close to being true.We can represent the proportion of men in the population by the letter
p
(where
p
= 0
.
49). Necessarily, then, the proportion of women in the populationis given by 1
 p
. If the total population is the sum of the men and women,given by
=
+
, then
=
pN 
and
= (1
 p
)
.As we showed earlier, the sum of sexual relationships is the same for both themen and the women. Let us represent this number by
. The average numberof partners for men is therefore given by
µ
=
/
=
/
 pN 
, and the averagenumber of partners for women is given by
µ
=
/
=
/(1
 p
)
.We will assume that the average is higher for men (which it should be if there are fewer men in the population). We can represent the difference of the
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Here I refer to “sexual relationships” rather than “partners” in order to avoid confusion,since some women will be counted more than once if they slept with different men.
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Polymath1976left a comment

I agree with your main premise. Namely, it is far more likely that women will contain small groups with very high partner counts than it is that men will. It is far easier, after all, for a woman to get laid if she is not bashful about it. I also agree that the distribution for women could be bimodal, although I suspect that the mode to the right will have a far lower peak than the one to the left. I assume that we can agree that if the entire population were surveyed, the averages would be essentially equal (differing only slightly due to unequal denominators). Your claim is that the small group of women with astronomical partner counts are easy to miss due to their scarcity, thereby deflating the average for all women. The behavior of most women is represented by the lower average, since the ones who were missed are not representative of the population. Men, on the other hand, more closely resemble one another in their behavior, so their higher average is accurate. I do see your point, and I do think that some variation in the data can be explained that way. Even so, I still believe that there is significant over- and under-reporting taking place in these surveys. A sample of N women would require skipping over enough promiscuous women in the population to account for 14N uncounted sexual partners in order to explain the results in the survey I discuss. If we are talking about a sample size of 1,000, then there are 14,000 sexual relationships that were missed due to our choice of the particular women sampled. It could be as easy as missing 14 women who each slept with 1,000 men. That is certainly possible. (It would all depend on their concentration in the population. If it is anywhere near even one percent, it is highly unlikely that 14 would be missed in a sample of 1,000.) But as the sample size goes up, that sort of scenario becomes much less likely. (This is of course why sampling error goes down with increasing sample size.)

Polymath1976left a comment

Perhaps the main point I would make to challenge this claim is this: There is evidence of the improbability of missing these women in a well-designed survey to be found in the reports of the men. In other words, the men—and lots of them—had no problem finding them, suggesting that the local social network containing these men was sufficiently well connected to permit their meeting these women. The men have been sampled from that network, and so have the women, creating similar odds of forming a good sample. Promiscuous women may be more rare—and more promiscuous—than promiscuous men, but I do not believe the rarity is sufficient to explain a whopping 14-point differential between the sexes. After all, if the concentration of these women in the population was low enough to make missing them in a survey likely, it becomes unlikely that their social connectivity would be sufficient to have their "attention" fairly evenly distributed among the men, which is a crucial part of your argument. What would be great, and what I bet we'd both like to see, is some deeper statistical results—range, variance, sample size, etc.—that would put these results in context. Thanks again for your comments. I really enjoyed the exchange.

johneosborneleft a comment

To clarify: there is certainly a survey design problem here, but I'm suggesting that the surveys are accurate for nearly all men and women. They might be inaccurate for only a very small number of women. These women might not get sampled, or they might be particularly prone to lying. If their promiscuity comes from a dysfunction, it's easy to imagine that they are ashamed of their behavior and want to cover it up, or are suppressing their awareness of an underlying depression.

johneosborneleft a comment

Here's the problem I have with the idea that the survey is poorly designed - these results come up again and again, in different countries by different researchers and in different generations. There's something real behind these numbers. It may be a biological difference in how men and women report (lie) about their behavior, or it may be a biological difference in their sexual behavior. I think you're assuming in your reasoning about the statistics that the distributions are similar between the male and female populations. I'm suggesting that they might have very different distributions. I wouldn't be surprised if both men and women had a bimodal distribution, with a second peak at the high end comprised of people who are unusually promiscuous. But I'm suggesting that the high-end peak for women is exceptionally high and exceptionally sharp, much moreso than for men. Sampling error would then have a greater impact on statistics for the women. I'm suggesting that a higher, sharper peak for women could be explained by the ease with which attractive, dysfunctional women can find male partners. There are probably few opportunities to be a Wilt Chamberlain (a world-class celebrity), but potentially many opportunities to be an A.W., my girlfriend in college who'd had over 200 partners in one year. She's now a middle class mom with a Ph.D. Of course it's true that for every male yes there has to be a female yes. But, if you sample yes answers in the male population more accurately than yes answers in the female population, you end up with a misrepresentation of the network.

Polymath1976left a comment

That is an interesting and fair point, John. Indeed, one might get strange results estimating a population average if one missed outliers (prostitutes, Wilt Chamberlain, etc.) when collecting data. (I allude to the possibility in my third footnote.) But keep in mind that these are not ordinary discrete data we are working with, since they refer to relationships between two elements (or edges between nodes, if you like). The key point is that a yes answer in the female group requires a yes answer somewhere in the male group and vice versa. Promiscuous people (women or men) would act as hubs in a network, but no matter how high their numbers, they could add at most one to anyone else's count. Missing such people in a random sampling is possible, but missing enough of them to create the type of disparity seen in this survey and others like it is tremendously unlikely. What I think is the case with the survey I looked at is that two phenomena occurred: 1) The polled subjects were less than completely honest. 2) The survey itself was poorly designed. It is possible that the second phenomenon was the most weighty in this case, but I am convinced that the first also played a significant role. Thank you for your thought-provoking comments!