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Nationwide survey seeks better understanding of challenges faced by LGBTQ+ women

By Jay Moreno on Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 1:42 pm

Unsplash / Jana Sabeth

The developers of the new nationwide survey say there's not enough data to provide a full understanding of challenges faced by women in the LGBTQ+ community.

More than 100 LGBTQ+ groups are partnering on a nationwide survey on the concerns of women in the community, which they're touting as the first of its kind.

The project — centered on issues such as employment, education, housing, religion, political affiliation, social lives and family relationships — is backed by groups including the National LGBTQ Task Force and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD. It's intended to paint a clearer picture of LGBTQ+ women for both advocates and policy makers.

Those interested in participating can sign up online to take the survey when it launches. It's open to LGBTQ+ people "who have identified as womxn at any point on their journeys," according to the official website, which launched on International Women's Day.

"We really don't have a national picture of what LGBTQ women are up against in terms of the way misogyny, sexism and racism over the course of your whole lifetime stacks up," survey research director Jaime Grant told the Current. "This is really going to be the first survey by us, for us, that talks to us in our own language about our experiences as LGBTQ women."

Grant, a writer and an LGBTQ+ activist since the early 1990s, said previous research on the community hasn't yielded enough information about common challenges faced by women.

"They put us all in the wrong places, they don't even really survey the entirety of the community, so we really want to break open that barrier in research," Grant said. "We're going to look at how all kinds of things impact us similarly and also how different things impact us specifically based on our identities."

Veteran activist Urvashi Vaid, who's spearheading the initiative, said in a news release that she hopes the survey data can improve LGBTQ+ women's access to services and resources at both the local and national levels.

"It’s outrageous that it’s 2021, and this will be the first national survey about the needs and priorities of LGBTQ+ women specifically," Vaid said in a statement. "We had to create an independent project to get this work off the ground."

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