How gay is your star sign?

I will be the first to admit that it really doesn't take a whole lot to distract me from the task at hand (bright colours, shiny objects, pretty girls...). And bearing in mind that I happen to be doing some particularly tedious lab work at the moment (involving molecular biology, which requires repetitive yet precise tasks and therefore much concentration), its hardly surprising that my mind wandered off on a complete tangent. Yet again. But this particular tangent drove me to distraction to the point where I actually went to the library, acquired some statistics software, some books on how to use said software, and proceeded to re-learn stats, all just so that I could satiate my curiosity ..and then blog about it. None of this pansy-assed procrastination for me! No, no, no! Mine really embraces my inner nerd. My inner uber-nerd as it turns out. But I guess at least its been mildly productive, in that I really did actually need to pick up my stats skills again sooner or later, and naturally that wasn't about to happen with just my own boring old data as an incentive. Not when I could have a pointless and completely-unrelated-to-anything-I'm-doing topic to focus on instead.

So this all stemmed from a recurring observation that cropped up repeatedly over the course of various conversations I'd been having online with my friend. It turns out that every other lesbian we know is called Sarah. Seriously. It has to be the gayest name. Out of the four Sarah's in my email address book, four of them are gay. I also live with another Sarah - also gay. My friend's sister, Sarah, is a gay. As are her friend and one of her ex's. So that's 8 Sarahs, known to just 2 people, who are all gay. This might just a product of Sarah being a common girls name in general, but Sarah does appear to be the gayest name. For lesbians. (I imagine its slightly less common among gay guys). This got me thinking and it didn't take long before stumbling on to the question of which is the gayest zodiac sign (which I might add is possibly the single most gay question to even think about, but you Googled it and wound up here so at least my shame is not alone).

Thankfully, to help solve this query, I had Gaydargirls.com close at hand. For those that don't know, this is a lesbian "networking" site that allows people to exchange messages, view each others profiles, chat, meet up, and umm, yes.. crashing on. And it just so happens that one of the various ways in which you can search through other people's profiles is by their star sign. Cue one very productively spent afternoon searching gayspace to see how many lesbians there are online in each of the 12 signs of the zodiac.

I conducted this search city by city. I started in Glasgow, it being where I have myself listed, and was immediately struck that there were just over twice as many Capricorns (apparently the most common sign), than Sagittarians (the least). "Hmmm", I thought. So I decided to check if this were just a freak anomalous peculiarity of Glasgow, and so went on to check those profiles listed under London too. Again I found there were twice as many Capricorns than Sagittarians.

Time to get scientific. Obviously having just two cities is a fairly small sample size (n=2) for comparison, so I quickly surveyed a selection of the gayest cities I could think of. At first I stuck to the UK, and included Glasgow, London, Manchester and Brighton. And as I added more data, so the pattern seemed to keep. Perhaps this is a British phenomena? So I broadened my sample populations farther and included Sydney and Melbourne too (possibly getting a tad too carried away by this point). However, when I plotted the results, I was quite surprised at how the trend was the same, regardless of city, with seemingly the most frequently observed star signs being Capricorn and Aquarius, and the least being Sagittarius, and Libra.



Not happy with mere descriptive statistics, I decided to perform an analysis of variance to determine if the average values for these signs was actually statistically different from each other, in other words, are there statistically more Capricorns than Sagittarians i.e.. is Capricorn really the gayest star sign? Cue one trip to library followed by much nerding up on stats.

Well, as it turns out, the answer is: No. The results came out as not significant F(11,60)=1.272, P=.262, meaning that the fact that there are apparently twice as many Capricorns as Sagittarians is purely down to chance (small sample size).

Ah phooey.
I was just about to look up the UKs national statistics about most popular birth months of the general population, to see if there were just more births in general anyway that fell under Capricorn, rather than it being just a gay thing - the difference between correlation and cause - before thankfully it dawned on me that I was maybe taking this too far now. I also had the suspicion that where people entered no date of birth on their Gaydar profile it might default to January 1st - Capricorn.

Although, an interesting side thought did pop out during my analyses however... funnily enough, and keeping with the general train of though: which is the gayest city?
Ideally I should have presented the number of profiles proportional to city population size, but I didn't have time, but bear in mind Manchester and Glasgow have about half a million people, and London, Melbourne, Sydney have 4 million and over. Well, despite my first assumptions being that it would be Sydney, or London, it was in fact Manchester, followed by London, Glasgow, then Sydney and the rest. Of course, this is probably more likely because Aussie girls, unlike us Brits, have far better things to do with their time than spend hours getting square eyed and pallid online. Let alone spending whole days being nerds researching silly notions like how gay is your name/star sign/city that really seemed a whole lot more amusing at the time, before publicly airing them.

I really must try out one of those l i f e things everyone's always going on about.