Introduction
Men are more likely to experience orgasms during sexual encounters than women. At the same time, there are common misperceptions about what is likely to make a woman orgasm.
In particular, the vast majority of the population considers intercourse to be the definitive sexual act, but intercourse is one of the least effective ways to make a woman orgasm.
We now have three large surveys confirming the fact that intercourse is poor at causing orgasms in women. They are:
Australian Study of Health and Relationships (Richters et al., 2006)
NBC News’ Website Survey (Frederick et al., 2018)
KnowledgePanel / OMGYes.com Survey (Herbenick et al., 2018)
I discuss the quality of each survey in the appendix.
Orgasm Gender Gap
In a heterosexual context, the Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR) found that it is about six times more common for women to go without orgasm than men. Ritchers et al. report:
It is unusual for a man not to have an orgasm when he has sex with a woman: only 5.2% of men did not reach orgasm at their last heterosexual encounter. It is much more common for women, 31.1% of whom did not reach orgasm.
In homosexual relations, women fare better, but still do not experience orgasms at the same rate as men in either heterosexual or homosexual relations. Frederick et al. tell us:
Heterosexual men were more likely than heterosexual women to always orgasm (75% HM vs. 33% HW; p < .001) and usually-always orgasm (95% HM vs. 65% HW; p < .001) when ‘‘sexually intimate’’ during the past month. Lesbian women were less likely than heterosexual men to always orgasm (59% LW vs. 75% HM; p < .001) or usually-always orgasm (86% LW vs. 95% HM; p < .001). Lesbian women were, however, more likely than heterosexual women to always orgasm (59% LW vs. 33% HW; p < .001) or usually-always orgasm (86% LW vs. 65% HW; p < .001). The patterns for bisexual women were similar to heterosexual women, and patterns for gay and bisexual men were similar to those of heterosexual men, except that they were slightly less likely to always orgasm when sexually intimate.
What Is “Having Sex?”
The fact that the majority of the population equates “having sex” with intercourse, at least in a heterosexual context, complicates the data. There is much more evidence for sexual encounters involving intercourse than for sexual encounters that do not include intercourse.
In the ASHR, ~95% of most recent heterosexual encounters included vaginal intercourse, consistent with previous studies.
There are two ways in which vaginal intercourse can account for so much of heterosexual encounter data in surveys.
Firstly, many couples treat it as obligatory. When such couples decide to “have sex,” they include intercourse in their sexual encounter because that is what “having sex” means. This phenomenon, though worthy of criticism in other regards, does not compromise the data.
Secondly, survey respondents whose most recent sexual encounter did not include intercourse might report some other encounter instead because they do not consider their actual most recent encounter to count as “having sex.”
This latter phenomenon creates an issue for analysis because data are lost. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do about respondents who fail to report such encounters, but it is worth acknowledging that this is a potential issue.1
Which Acts Are Better at Making Women Orgasm Than Intercourse?
Intercourse itself either has a negligible impact on the rate of orgasm in women or actually decreases the rate of orgasm.
Ritchers et al. looked into the most recent heterosexual encounter reported on the ASHR and tabulated whether the respondents experienced an orgasm, categorized by the sex acts they practiced.
Men, by and large, reliably had an orgasm. Men had an orgasm at least 81% of the time, regardless of the specific sexual acts involved. However, there was an increase in the orgasm rate when vaginal intercourse was involved. Men whose last encounter included only manual and oral stimulation experienced an orgasm at a rate of 87.3%. In contrast, those who engaged in vaginal intercourse in addition to receiving manual and oral stimulation experienced an orgasm at a rate of 97.7%. Thus, there was about a 10 percentage point “bonus” from intercourse for men.
On the other hand, only about half women (49.6%) experienced an orgasm when their last encounter consisted only of vaginal intercourse. When the women were manually stimulated, this rate increased to 70.9%. When oral and manual stimulation were included, the rate further increased to 85.6%.
Moreover, there appeared to be a “penalty” rather than a “bonus” from vaginal intercourse. Women who had manual stimulation without intercourse had an orgasm at a rate of 78.7%, versus women who had manual stimulation plus intercourse, who had an orgasm at a rate of 70.9%. Women who had manual and oral stimulation without intercourse had an orgasm at a rate of 90.0%, versus women who had manual and oral stimulation plus intercourse, who had an orgasm at a rate of 85.6%. Thus, including intercourse in a sexual encounter actually decreased the rate of orgasm.2
This phenomenon was partially corroborated by the NBC News website’s survey.
Frederick et al. (2018) did something odd with their analysis of the NBS News website’s survey data. Instead of using whether or not the respondent had an orgasm in the most recent encounter as the response variable, they used whether the respondent “usually” or “always” had an orgasm versus “rarely” or “never” had an orgasm over the past month as the response variable. However, they still used the practices in the most recent encounter as the explanatory variable for categorization.
Frederick et al. justify this analysis with this discussion:
We … examined event-level data, which may be less prone to recall biases. Participants were asked about their activities during the last time they had sex. If these behaviors are representative of what couples typically do, they may provide information about which practices are linked to greater orgasm frequency. Consistent with the proposal that event-level data are informative about general practices, 87% of women and 92% of men in this data set who received oral sex during their last sexual encounter reported usually-always receiving oral sex in the past month. Also consistent with this proposal, reports of oral sex during last encounter were lower if they reported oral sex half of the time (50% women; 60% men) and lowest if they reported oral sex never-rarely (10% women; 12% men) during the past month.
Thus, their justification for this arrangement was that survey respondents are better at remembering a specific event than what they did over a whole month, and the practices during the most recent event appear to be a good proxy for what people do over the past month.
The lowest rate of “usually” or “always” orgasm frequency (35%) among heterosexual women occurred with those who had only vaginal intercourse in their last sexual encounter. The highest rate among heterosexual women occurred among those who experienced all the practices except intercourse — 80% among women who received oral sex, genital stimulation, and deep kissing, but not intercourse.
Whether or not there is an intercourse penalty is more equivocal in the NBC News data. For instance, women who who received oral sex and genital stimulation without intercourse reported usually-always orgasming at a higher rate (73%) than did those who also had vaginal intercourse (69%). However, there are some counterexamples. For instance, women who received oral sex and deep kissing without intercourse reported usually-always orgasming at a lower rate (69%) than did those who also had vaginal intercourse (71%).
I suspect these differences are within sampling error of zero, though neither Frederick et al. (2018) nor Richters et al. (2006) quantified sampling error in their analyses.
Generally, in the NBC News survey data, the rate of usually-always orgasm frequency was a function of practices other than intercourse, and the presence or absence of intercourse had a negligible effect on the usually-always orgasm rate.
Things do not look good for intercourse with regard to women’s orgasms. Why might this be the case?
Physiological Reasons
One reason might be purely physiological. Intercourse directly stimulates the penis, but does not directly stimulate the clitoris, which is the homologue of the penis in female genitalia.
The KnowledgePanel survey commissioned by OMGYes.com addressed this directly. Herbenick et al. report:
In this sample, 36.6% (n = 347) of intercourse-experienced women reported that they needed clitoral stimulation in order to orgasm during intercourse; 36.0% (n = 341) reported that although they did not require clitoral stimulation for orgasm during intercourse, adding it enhanced orgasm; and 18.4% (n = 174) reported that vaginal penetration alone during intercourse was sufficient for orgasm. The remaining 9.0% of women reported they did not have orgasms during intercourse (7.5%, n = 71) or described other patterns or routines (e.g., clitoral stimulation prior to intercourse, orgasm via cunnilingus followed by intercourse, etc.).
Thus, stimulation of the clitoris is either required for orgasm or enhances orgasm for the vast majority of women (72.6%).3
Furthermore, clitoral stimulation appears to increase the frequency of orgasm during intercourse among women. Herbenick et al. (2018) found that 22.3% of respondents reported an orgasm frequency of “always” when receiving clitoral stimulation during intercourse, versus 13.5% of respondents during intercourse without clitoral stimulation. This trend is present for all possible orgasm frequency responses, as seen in the bar plot above.
Motivations for Sexual Encounter
Richters et al. propose the hypothesis that the sex acts involved in an encounter might correlate with the motivations for the sexual encounter.
First, they observe that there is an asymmetry in heterosexual couples in the desire for sexual activity:
When asked how often they would ideally like to have sex, men’s stated ideal frequency was somewhat higher than women’s. The median response from men was four to six times a week, whereas the median response from women was in the “two or three times a week” category.
It follows that there might be encounters in which one partner desires sexual activity, but the other does not, and the undesirous partner engages in the encounter merely for the benefit of the desirous partner. Couples likely engage in sex acts agreeable to the desirous partner in these encounters.
Thus, intercourse-only sexual encounters might comprise a greater proportion of sexual encounters done when the man desires sexual activity and the woman is participating for the man’s sake. Similarly, encounters involving manual or oral stimulation of the woman but not intercourse might involve a greater proportion of sexual encounters done when the woman desires them and the man is participating for the woman’s sake.
When an encounter occurs just for one partner’s benefit, the undesirous partner might be less likely to orgasm due to a lack of motivation. This could explain some of the differences in the rate of orgasm among women between categories of sexual encounter by sex act.
Orgasm Is More Likely with a Regular Partner
If the presence or absence of intercourse has little effect on the rate of orgasm for women, then what does?
The factor that stood out in the ASHR was having a regular sexual partner.
Ritchers et al. tabulated whether respondents had an orgasm during their last heterosexual encounter by several variables from the respondents’ sexual histories. Men reliably had an orgasm regardless of their backgrounds.
Women experienced an orgasm at lower rates overall. The differences between the various levels of the variables were minor for the most part (less than 10 percentage points), with one major exception: women who did not have a regular partner experienced an orgasm at a rate of 48.7%, but the rate for those who did have a regular partner was 70.0% — a whopping 21 percentage point difference!
Having a regular partner benefits the rate of orgasm among men, as well, but the difference is less dramatic since men tend to reliably orgasm. Men who did not have a regular partner experienced an orgasm at a rate of 87.6%, but the rate for those who did have a regular partner was 95.5% — an 8 percentage point difference.
Unlike in their sex act analysis, Richters et al. gave us 95% confidence intervals for the odds ratios of the rates of orgasm. Because the confidence intervals for the odds ratios by partner type “regular” versus “other” for both women and men do not include 1.00, we can infer that the results are statistically significant at the α = 0.05 error rate.
The NBC News website survey only targeted respondents with regular sex partners, so Frederick et al. do not shed light on whether women orgasm at a higher rate with regular partners due to a lack of comparisons.
The KnowledgePanel / OMGYes.com survey did not specifically ask what kind of relationship respondents were in. However, the survey did have a more open-ended question about what enhanced orgasms among women.
The second and third most popular answers of “having a partner who knows what I like” and “emotional intimacy” are synonymous with having a regular sex partner and are only behind “spending time to build-up arousal” in popularity among women for orgasm enhancement. This is consistent with the findings from the ASHR that having a regular sexual partner increases the likelihood of orgasm among women.
Conclusion
Overall, women experience orgasm during a sexual encounter at a lower rate than men. This is true for both same-sex and opposite-sex sexual encounters, but the difference between men and women is greater in opposite-sex encounters.
Intercourse is considered the definitive sexual act in heterosexual encounters. Simultaneously, the inclusion of intercourse in a sexual encounter has either no effect or an adverse effect on the rate of orgasm among women. The inclusion of intercourse does have a small positive impact on the rate of orgasm among men. Thus, the focus on intercourse in sexual encounters exacerbates the orgasm gender gap.
Sex acts that are more adept at making women orgasm include manual stimulation of the clitoris, cunnilingus, and kissing. Furthermore, having a regular sexual partner who knows what a particular woman likes and with whom she has emotional intimacy increases the rate of orgasm among women and enhances orgasms for most women.
There is an obvious editorial to be written based on these data. However, I will save that editorial article until after I discuss two more analyses: one on the trend in rates of unintended pregnancy after the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 70s, and another on the ineffectiveness of contraception from then until this very day.
Appendix: Data Sources
Throughout the article, I have written about “women” and “men.” This should more precisely be “women and men in Australia, the United States, and possibly other countries with similar sexual cultures.”
The ASHR surveyed a nationally representative sample from Australia, and the KnowledgePanel / OMGYes.com survey used a representative sample from the United States. All three surveys reinforce similar conclusions for the results discussed in this article, so it is safe to conclude that the populations of Australia and the United States are similar enough with regard to these specific conclusions that the results apply to at least these two countries.
It is quite possible that results would differ in other countries. This is less likely for results based on physiological causes, assuming small differences in female physiology from country to country. However, the size of the orgasm gender gap, for instance, presumably differs from place to place based on the sexual cultures there.
The article was already long, and general readers seem to care little about the scope of inference of studies, so I have relegated this discussion to this appendix.
I discuss the specifics of each of the three surveys below.
Australian Study of Health and Relationships (Richters et al., 2006)
The ASHR used random-digit dialing (RDD) via telephone, targeting all men and women in Australia aged 16 to 59 years. RDD is not as good as address-based sampling (ABS), but RDD is cheaper and is still used by Gallup and other pollsters.
Ritchers et al. report “The overall response rate was 73.1% (69.4% among men and 77.6% among women).” If this survey were done in 2025, this would be an outstanding response rate, but even by 2006 standards, it was pretty good.
The overall sample size was effectively n = 5,118 for the results discussed in this article, because the survey instrument about recent sexual behavior was given to a subsample of 7,653 people, and 5,118 people from this subsample were sexually active and reported a recent sexual encounter with an opposite-sex partner.
The raw sample would almost certainly be biased (e.g., some people have multiple phone numbers by which they can be reached, while others have none; some people don’t pick up the phone if they don’t recognize the number). Additionally, some oversampling was done (by region and of men) to reach the target sample sizes. It was, therefore, important to adjust the sample weights to make the sample match the target population.
Fortunately, the ASHR did such a weight adjustment. Ritchters et al. describe:
Data were weighted to adjust for the probability of household selection (households with more phone lines were more likely to be contacted) and to adjust for the probability of selection within a household (individuals living in households with more eligible people were less likely to be selected). Further weighting on the basis of age, gender, and area of residence ensured that both the full sample and the subsample matched the Australian population as reported in the 2001 Census.
NBC News (Frederick et al., 2018)
The survey from the NBC News website was the weakest of the three. It was basically an opportunity sample of people who happened to browse the NBC News website. Thus, there was no guarantee that the sample was representative of any population whatsoever. This, coupled with the strange way Frederick et al. framed their Table 4 results, almost made me not include the paper. However, the results largely corroborate the ASHR study and extend the results to same-sex couples, so I opted to include it.
The sample size was n = 52,588. The criteria for inclusion were:
…aged 18–65 years; completed the full survey via the NBC News entry portal; indicated they were married, remarried, cohabiting, or dating/seeing one person; and reported being intimate in the past month in response to the question about orgasm frequency over the last month.
Frederick et al. note that NBC News might have a biased television audience, but that:
Market research on NBCNews.com (formerly msnbc.com) shows that, at the time of the surveys, it routinely ranked among one of the most popular Web sites in the U.S. Its 58 million unique monthly visitors included a broad diversity of people in terms of age, income, and political orientation. It is important to note that msnbc.com, the general news Website, was a different entity than MSNBC TV and had substantially different demographics, including approximately equal numbers of Democrat and Republican visitors.
Frederick et al. make no mention of weight adjustment to try to match the target population’s known demographic characteristics. The lack of such discussion, coupled with the fact that they had an opportunity sample, not a probability-based one, leads me to believe that no weighting was done at all.
Thus, the results of the NBC News survey shouldn’t be generalized to any population other than the NBC News users who felt like filling out a survey during that specific ten-day period. Still, this limited population seems to have had similar experiences concerning women’s orgasms as the target population of the ASHR.
KnowledgePanel / OMGYes.com (Herbenick et al., 2018)
Despite being commissioned by a website with a whimsical name, the KnowledgePanel / OMGYes.com survey seems to have been taken seriously. Herbenick et al. tell us:
The study was conducted during June 2015 with GfK Research (Menlo Park, CA), who sampled adult (ages 18+) female U.S. residents from its KnowledgePanel®, a probability-based web panel demonstrated to be representative of the non-institutionalized U.S. population and frequently utilized by scientists to collect U.S. probability data on a range of topics. Probability-based sampling techniques (address-based sampling [ABS] using the U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File and random digit dialing [RDD] methods) have been used to recruit panel members. Households without Internet access are provided with hardware and/or Internet access as needed, in order to minimize the risk that only higher-resource or regular Internet-using households are included.
These hybrid online panels have become popular because they try to get the cost savings of an online survey while maintaining the sampling rigor of traditional surveys. They accomplish this by recruiting people into their online panel using traditional probability-based sampling methods and running many online surveys using the already recruited panel.
The sample size was n = 524, and the response rate was 43.7%. (I count the response rate as the percentage of people who received the invitation to complete the survey who actually did.)
GfK Research did a weight adjustment to try to make the sample match the target population:
Although the recruitment process is intended to represent the U.S. adult population, GfK then prepared post-stratification statistical weights to correct for possible non-response or any under- or over-coverage based on demographic variables from the Current Population Survey (e.g., gender by age, race/ethnicity, education, census region, household income, Internet access).
It’s odd to use the Current Population Survey (CPS) instead of the American Community Survey (ACS) and decennial Census data since the ACS was invented for such a purpose. (The CPS is commissioned by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is used primarily for unemployment statistics.) However, this is just a methodological curiosity; I doubt this would change the results substantially.
This is about as robust a survey as you can get nowadays without resorting to the kind of budget that the General Social Survey or large government bureaucracies have.
References
Frederick, D. A., John, H. K. St., Garcia, J. R., & Lloyd, E. A. (2018). Differences in Orgasm Frequency Among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(1), 273–288. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0939-z
Herbenick, D., Fu, T.-C. J., Arter, J., Sanders, S. A., & Dodge, B. (2018). Women’s Experiences With Genital Touching, Sexual Pleasure, and Orgasm: Results From a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Ages 18 to 94. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 44(2), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2017.1346530
Richters, J., de Visser, R., Rissel, C., & Smith, A. (2006). Sexual practices at last heterosexual encounter and occurrence of orgasm in a national survey. The Journal of Sex Research, 43(3), 217–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490609552320
In particular, because non-intercourse encounters are so few in survey responses, if there is a systematic difference between those who report non-intercourse encounters and those who don’t, this could bias the results.
See the previous footnote. Also, because of the relatively low sample size for the non-intercourse categories, these estimates might be prone to more fluctuations due to sampling error. Sampling error was not quantified by Ritchers et al. (2006).
This survey is often incorrectly cited as finding that only 18.4% of women can orgasm from intercourse alone. That is not accurate. The survey found that 54.4% of women can orgasm from intercourse alone, but the vast majority of such women have orgasms that are enhanced by clitoral stimulation. The 54.4% estimate is similar to the 49.6% estimate found by ASHR.
Her brain and emotional state is the most powerful sexual organ.