Dr. Debra Soh on statistics: what the evidence says · JRE #2082

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Soh's figures roughly track a real, widely-cited 2020 JAMA Network Open study (Ueda et al.), which analyzed the nationally representative General Social Survey and found that by 2018, about 1 in 3 men aged 18 to 24 reported no sexual activity in the past year, up sharply from about 10% in 2008. The same study found smaller but real increases in past-year sexual inactivity among men and women aged 25 to 34. However, the 18-to-24 age group in that study is largely Generation Z, not millennials (who were born roughly 1981-1996 and were approximately 24-39 in 2018), so Soh's attribution of the roughly 30% figure to "male millennials" is imprecise; the sharpest sexlessness increase the study documents is concentrated in the youngest cohort rather than millennials broadly. The claimed 20% figure for women is higher than what the study reports for any female age group in that dataset, and no single peer-reviewed source was found pairing an exact 30%-men/20%-women split specifically by the millennial generation. Overall, the general direction and rough magnitude of the claim (a notable rise in sexlessness among young men, a smaller rise among young women) is well-supported by the best available survey data, but the specific numbers and generational label as stated do not precisely match the published findings.