How big is the orgasm gender gap? And why aren’t we closing it?
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We all know about the gender pay gap. We’ve written about the gender retirement savings gap. You may have heard about the gender wealth gap, or the gender leadership gap (thanks largely to the motherhood penalty). But who has heard about the gender orgasm gap?
As you’ve likely guessed, the gender orgasm gap means that men orgasm more often than women do (we’ll get to the numbers in a bit). We know it’s easier for men, anatomically.
The orgasm gap between men and women has been studied for decades. This includes “feminist scholarship that explores the problem of a sexual script constructed in a patriarchy that largely devalues the clitoris”. Yet the gap persists.
I did a very unscientific poll in a Facebook group asking women who have partners whether they orgasm every time they have sex – mostly, sometimes, or never. ‘Every time’ was 8%. ‘Mostly’ was 30%. ‘Sometimes’ was 41%. ‘Never’ was 21%.
You may be nodding along right now. If you’re surprised by these numbers, it’s probably because most of us don’t discuss our sex life with our friends – and some of us don’t even discuss it with our partners.
One woman was willing to talk to me (well, to have a text conversation) on Messenger. Aged 29, she thinks that she orgasms maybe one in four times while having sex with her boyfriend of five years.
“He never asks if I’ve had an orgasm or and doesn’t try to make sure I have an orgasm. If I do, it’s a bonus. I think of it as ‘one and done’. To be honest, sometimes I’m quite bored during the process.” She doesn’t talk to her partner about sex at all. “I may have some sort of prudishness rooted in growing up in a religious family.” She’s not religious now. So why not bring it up? “I’m embarrassed to! And he might say ‘why didn’t you bring this up five years ago?’”
Has she faked some orgasms? Absolutely. A major study shows that nearly 60% of women have done so (though perhaps not with the skill of Meg Ryan in the film When Harry Met Sally,). Additionally, the report states that “more than half (55.4%) of women reported they had wanted to communicate with a partner regarding sex but decided not to; the most common reasons were not wanting to hurt a partner’s feelings (42.4%), not feeling comfortable going into detail (40.2%), and embarrassment (37.7%).”
Another woman I messaged with said a boyfriend broke up with her because she wasn’t having orgasms. “Rather than us looking at why, he said it was my problem and I should sort it out. Ah, men.”
A numbers game
Alt-right online magazine Evie seems to have added me and my boss to their Substack, perhaps as a punishment for publishing an article about Tradwives . But I haven’t unsubscribed because I want to know what drek they’re spewing. A recent article was called ‘Feminism Rewarded Effeminate Men And Screwed Good Women’. (I’m resisting the urge to fact-check this article.)
Anyhow, this story did point me to something interesting. “According to research from the University of Florida, men who engage in college hookups orgasm about 91% of the time, while that figure is only 32% for women”. (Actually, Evie, that percentage is 34%.) “During first-time hookups, it’s worse: women climax just 10 percent of the time compared to 68 percent of men.” Evie wants college girls to stop hooking up. “Considering how emotional the act of sex is for women, it’s clear that casual hookups are deeply uncomfortable [for women].” Gosh, talk about wild overgeneralisation.
That said, a large study of more than 52,000 Americans, found that 95% of heterosexual men said they usually or always orgasm when sexually intimate, while only 65% of heterosexual women said the same. That’s a 30% orgasm gap.
You’d hope things would ‘even out’ as we age. Nope. A large study, published in the journal Sexual Medicine in 2024, found that women’s orgasm rates during sex ranged from 46% to 58%, and that the orgasm gap does not improve with age.
How might things change?
“Women’s pleasure has been treated as secondary for far too long,” says Mariah Freya, CEO of Beducated. This online sex-education platform is working to close the orgasm gap through expert-led courses, and accessible education. “Despite decades of progress in gender equality, the orgasm gap remains persistent,” she says. “Our research shows that women know exactly what they need to orgasm – but when they’re with a partner, they hesitate to speak up. Many have been conditioned to see their pleasure as an afterthought, or worse, to fake it to avoid hurting their partner’s ego.”
Dr Laurie Mintz is a therapist, psychology professor, sex educator and author of the book ‘Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters and How To Get it’ which “aims to expose, explain and close the orgasm gap”. She says the orgasm gap is larger in hookup sex than in relationship sex. “When having sex with a familiar partner, women said they have an orgasm 63% of the time; men said 85% of the time.” That gap is 22%.
Dr Mintz has written a Psychology Today story called ‘The Orgasm Gap: Picking Up Where the Sex Revolution Left Off’. She writes that “at the core of the 1960s sexual revolution was ‘female sexual empowerment’. It fell short of this goal. Specifically, while the revolution made women having intercourse before marriage acceptable, it didn’t lead women to have equally pleasurable sexual experiences.” She says we need that gap to close.
Dr Mintz also wrote a story called ‘The Orgasm Gap: Simple Truth & Sexual Solutions’. “Culturally, we overvalue penetrative sex. To be a bit ‘punny,’ our cultural hyper-focus on the importance of putting a penis in a vagina is screwing with women’s orgasms… we use the words sex and intercourse synonymously, and relegate clitoral stimulation to ‘foreplay’ or that which comes before the main act of intercourse.” But we can’t always rely on the vagina.
Dr Mintz thinks sex ed in schools should include not just STIs and unplanned pregnancies but also clitoral knowledge and sexual pleasure.
“To close the orgasm gap, we have to hold clitoral stimulation and penetration as equal. Women also have to be able to let go of body-image self-consciousness and immerse themselves in sex. They have to feel entitled to pleasure, know what brings them pleasure (often through masturbating on their own to find out), and be able to communicate this to their partners. Finally, their partners have to want to use this information.” That’s a lot of ‘have tos”, so maybe we can start with some conversations, even when it’s hard.
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