Sexual Abstinence in the United States: Cohort Trends in Abstaining from Sex While Never Married for U.S. Women Born 1938 to 1983

In this data visualization, we document trends in abstaining from sex while never married for U.S. women born 1938–1939 to 1982–1983. Obtaining empirical estimates of sexual abstinence requires choosing some age at which to assess matters, and we have chosen to evaluate abstinence at age 30, an age by which most who have sex while never married have done so. The resulting operational definition thus consists of two distinct groups that abstained from sex while never married: (1) those who were never-married virgins at age 30 and (2) those who were virgins at first marriage and who married at or before age 30. (In results not reported, we find that estimates change little when using a later age to assess abstinence.) We estimated trends using data from the six most recent National Surveys of Family Growth (NSFGs), thus differing from Wu, Martin, and England (2017), whose analyses did not include data from the most recent (2011–2015) NSFG.

It is important to note that our estimates rely on self-reports by survey respondents. This is of particular concern for the oldest birth cohorts of women, some of whom may have been particularly reluctant to reveal that they were sexually active while never married. Our estimates also rely on female data and thus should be interpreted in light of a continuing sexual double standard that views the sexual activity of never married men and women differently. Finally, these data lack information on whether some women who were sexually active while never married had sex only with the men they eventually married, which may have been especially true among older birth cohorts of U.S. women (Klassen et al. 1989).

Cohort trends in sexual abstinence are reported in Figure 1 for U.S. women born 1938–1939, 1940–1941, . . . , 1982–1983. Because we evaluate abstinence at age 30, we restrict respondents in each 2-year birth cohort to those age 30 or older when participating in the NSFG. Estimates for the earliest birth cohorts are noisy, with abstinence estimated at 48.8 percent, 58.1 percent, 46.1 percent, and 47.9 percent for those born 1938–1939, 1940–1941, 1942–1943, and 1944–1945. Abstinence then declines nearly monotonically, beginning for those born 1944–1945 through those born 1964–1965, with abstinence declining particularly rapidly for those born in the 1940s and 1950s. The percentage abstaining from sex then fluctuates between approximately 9 percent and 12 percent for those born 1964–1965 through 1982–1983.

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Figure 1.

Percentage abstaining from sex while never married for U.S. women born 1938–1939, 1940–1941, . . . , 1982–1983. Female respondents in the 1982, 1988, 1995, 2002, 2006–2010, and 2011–2015 National Surveys of Family Growth who were aged 30 or older at the time of the survey. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are indicated by shaded regions.

Figure 1 shows that the percentage abstaining from sex has declined substantially among U.S. women. For those born in the early 1980s, which are the most recent birth cohorts in these data, roughly 11 percent were abstinent while 89 percent were sexually active while never married.

Our results thus show that sexual activity among never-married women in the United States has increased to levels that are close to universal. But we also find virtually no change in abstinence among recent birth cohorts of U.S. women—those born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s—with roughly one in nine of these women continuing to abstain from sex while never married.