Lesbian community health profile

Lesbian community health profile

Overview

The Lesbian community health profile has identified and summarised the national and local evidence concerning the health, lifestyle behaviours and wider determinants of health that affect the lesbian community.

Although the focus of this report was health inequalities among the lesbian community in Birmingham, the limited available information on health inequalities has resulted in data being used from the UK and internationally where available.

Community definition

‘Lesbian’ refers to a woman who has a romantic and/or sexual orientation towards women. Alternatively, women who have a romantic and/or sexual attraction towards women might identify as gay women, sexual minority women and/or women who have sex with women.

In this report, the term ‘lesbian’ will be used, unless otherwise specified.

Population size

Population size estimates have been taken from the 2021 census for England and Wales. There was no category in the census which exclusively refers to lesbians, the closest option under sexual orientation was ‘gay or lesbian’.

Data presented below follows analysis of sexual orientation by sex.

  • England and Wales: 288,269 women identified as ‘gay or lesbian’ (0.6% of the total population)
  • Birmingham: 4,257 women identified as ‘gay or lesbian’ (0.5% of the total population)

Health and wellbeing

You can learn more about the health and wellbeing needs, and the identified health inequalities of the lesbian population by reading the Lesbian community health profile report.

The full profile report does not yet include analysis from the 2021 census, this will be updated in due course.

Available resources

To support in your understanding of health inequalities among the lesbian community, we have produced several resources, including:

View all lesbian community health profile downloads

Webinar

Watch our webinar which provides a summary of the demographics and key health inequalities among the lesbian community:

You can switch on subtitles once you have started to play the video. A menu will appear on the video screen.

Page last updated: 8 April 2024

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