Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners

Abstract

One of the most reliable and perplexing findings from surveys of sexual behavior is that men report substantially more sexual partners than women do. We use data from national sex surveys and studies of prostitutes and their clients in the United States to examine sampling bias as an explanation for this disparity. We find that prostitute women are underrepresented in the national surveys. Once their undersampling and very high numbers of sexual partners are factored in, the discrepancy disappears. Prostitution's role in the discrepancy is not readily apparent because men are reluctant to acknowledge that their reported partners include prostitutes.A cross the world, probability sample household surveys of adult sexual behavior show that men report substantially more sexual partners than women do (1-13). This finding is puzzling, because in a closed population of heterosexuals, men and women actually have the same number of sexual partners in the aggregate. Explanations for this discrepancy pertain to either sex-linked reporting bias or sampling bias. Sex-linked reporting bias means that, for whatever reason, men overreport and͞or women underreport the number of their partners. Sampling bias refers to the undersampling of women who have had many partners and͞or women with whom sampled men have had sex but are outside the sampling frame. In our analysis, we evaluated sampling bias related to prostitution as an explanation for the disparity.Measuring the Discrepancy Data. We used data from the 1988-1991 General Social Surveys (GSS) (14) and the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) (8). These cross-sectional surveys involved multistage area probability samples of adults living in United States households (the NHSLS included adults under age 60 only). Although the population of the United States is not closed, we treated it as if it were, given the consistency of the measured sex discrepancy in countries from each major region of the world and at different levels of development.We used data based on responses to questions in paper self-administered questionnaires (SAQs), except as noted. In both surveys, two questions ask about the number of sexual partners in the last 12 months and 5 years (asked in the GSS since 1991), respectively. Response options include 1, 2, 3, 4, 5-10, 11-20, 21-100, and more than 100. In the 1991 GSS, some respondents answered these questions in an open-ended fashion. For each recall period, we recoded open-ended responses to the closed-ended response categories. Following T. W. Smith's procedures (personal communication), we recoded response categories involving ranges to the midpoints and recoded ''more than 100'' partners to ''101.'' For the NHSLS 12-month recall period, we followed Laumann et al. (8) by using the greater of the SAQ response and the face-to-face response to a similar question. For both surveys, we defined heterosexuals as those who reported only opposite-sex partners for a given recall period.Our analyses of the GSS are based on data from 1988 to 1991 com...

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