Our Values
Our work centers and celebrates women. Our work is trans-inclusive, gender-expansive, and anti-racist. Our work challenges patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism. We hold these values as core to our feminist practices and essential to building gender justice.*SURVEY
Knowledge Is Power.
Let’s Build It Together.
A Powerful Tool in the Fight for Social Justice.
We created the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey to make our lives more visible, to celebrate the expansiveness of our community, and to demand full recognition of our whole selves and all our lived experiences. In collaboration with 117 partner organizations, we collected stories from thousands of LGBTQ+ women. We built a comprehensive data set based on 5,002 completed surveys, organized around twenty thematic areas, and examined through eight demographic lenses.
Together, we will use this data to strengthen our movements, shift policy agendas, and increase funding streams, directing them to where they are most needed.
*DATA
Explore. Learn. Use.
New Resources Coming Soon!
The first report of the survey, We Never Give Up the Fight, is is now available. Co-authored by Jaime Grant and Alyasah 'Ali' Sewell, it explores key findings and trends. The foreward is written by Dr Bianca D.M. Wilson.
Alison Bechdel has generously produced the first visualization of our data. Check it out here.
We will be launching our podcast on the survey data in the Fall of 2023. It will explore individual questions from the survey with activists, researchers, and policymakers.
We will be posting videos and other resources as we develop them.
To access the data portal, you must be a partner organization.
Apply here to become a survey community partner.
Register to access the data portal and our survey materials,
including a user guide and overview of the survey instrument.
Examine the summary tables, charts, and select crosstabs
across gender, sexuality, race, region, age, personal income,
family socio-economic level, and educational background.
Explore the data thematically across twenty different
topic areas including: family formation, children,
disability, health, housing, employment, state violence,
interpersonal violence, sex and intimacy, and
community organizing.
Join Us
Check out forthcoming events.
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Stay updated on the latest news,
information and opportunities
related to our work.
*ACTION
Get Involved!
Fight for Gender Justice.
Support Our Partners
Find out more about our 117 community partners who made our project possible.
Become A Partner
If you think our data could
strengthen your work, apply
here to become a community
partner and access our data portal.
Share Your Change Stories
If our data helps you, please share
your stories with us.
*CHANGE
Data Justice:
A Process and an Outcome.
Data Justice begins by asking
“How can we use data to remake
the world?” It includes critically thinking about the ways in which data is collected, analyzed, explained, and shared. It works to ensure that voices and experiences from the margins are heard and amplified. And it challenges unequal power including binaries and hierarchies.
Summary extract from Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. MIT Press, 2020.
Data can be a powerful tool in the fight for social justice. It can expose injustice, strengthen advocacy for change, and measure progress towards shifting resources and power.
But it can also undermine social justice by reinforcing power, privilege, bias, and stereotypes.
Moving forward, we are focusing on making our survey data widely available – in many different forms.
We will also be actively supporting community partners to use our data to strengthen their advocacy, organizing, policy making, research and service work.
Three institutions will be leading different aspects of this work.
Dr. Carla Sutherland will continue to lead work related to raising resources to support activists and researchers to make their own meaning from our data, and to explore creative ways to share and use it.
Dr. Alyasah 'Ali' Sewell will lead the work related to making the full respondent level data available whilst improving the user experience of the survey and enhancing its principled foundation in Black feminist thought.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center is serving as the production home for the inaugural report We Never Give Up the Fight. The report is being prepared and authored by Dr. Jaime Grant, co-founder of the survey.
1958 – 2022
“The lesbian agenda is the reconstruction of families, it is the reimagining of power, it is the reorganization of the economic system, it is the reinforcement of civil rights and dignity for all people, it is the end of the oppression of women, the end of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia,
it is the re-establishment of a proper relationship to our environment. When I list this laundry list
of oppression it does not overwhelm me, it tells me how far I have to go in my struggle, it tells
me who my allies are.”
—Urvashi Vaid, National Lesbian Conference 1991
*VISION
Reimaging Power
Through a Lesbian Agenda.
Urvashi took great pride in her identity as a “dyke” and a “lesbian”. She was sometimes questioned about why she continued to embrace it when it seemed at odds with the nuanced, intersectional, non-binary and fluid spaces of new generations of queer activists. For her there was no contradiction: her activism always centered an expansive notion of intersectionality and justice.
Our project was shaped by this vision, and it will continue to guide our work moving forward.