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Today, just as in 1947, research at the Kinsey Institute seeks to illuminate the most intimate and formative aspects of our lives.

Developments in fields ranging from neuroscience and psychology to biology and gender studies inform questions asked by our scientists. 

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Many researchers also use the Kinsey Institute’s library, collections, and scholarly archives to learn more about the history of sexuality. Resources include the works of Alfred Kinsey and Masters & Johnson .

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Gender Equity in Business

The Kinsey-Kelley Center for Gender Equity in Business addresses issues of gender inequity, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment in the workplace. Read more

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Solid research on sexual assault, including risk factors for perpetration and victim experience, is the foundation for prevention.   Read more

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 The Kinsey Institute's Disability and Sexual Health Initiative (DASHI) works to understand and improve the intimate lives and sexual wellbeing of people with disabilities and their partners. Read more

The Kinsey Scale

The Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale, best known as the Kinsey Scale, was developed in 1948. The scale accounted for research findings that showed people did not fit into exclusive heterosexual or homosexual categories. Read more

Condoms are a critical public health strategy for disease and pregnancy prevention. But their effectiveness hinges on more than consistent use. Men and women must also use them correctly. The  Kinsey Institute’s Condom Use Research Team (KI-CURT) studies the reasons condoms can fail. Read more

Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study

Documenting changes in young women’s behaviors across many domains of social life during the transition to adulthood that may lead to undesired pregnancy, including intimate relationships, sexual behavior, and contraceptive use.  Read more

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The Kinsey Institute's Traumatic Stress Research Consortium (KI-TSRC) is pioneering collaborative research with clinicians on long-term changes to physiology, physical health, and emotional wellbeing in the aftermath of trauma. Read more

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Developed at the Kinsey Institute, this model of sexual response proposes our sexual decision-making is governed by competing drives of inhibition and excitation. Read more

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Studies investigating the effects of the pandemic on our sexual and romantic lives, family-planning and reproductive strategies, and the long-term effects on our emotional and mental wellbeing. Read more

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• v.93(6); Jun 2003

Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer Of Sex Research

Theodore m. brown.

1 Theodore M. Brown is with the Departments of History and of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester, NY. Elizabeth Fee is with the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

Elizabeth Fee

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL Americans of the 20th century, Alfred Charles Kinsey conducted landmark studies of male and female sexual behavior that helped usher in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. He was born in Hoboken, NJ, on June 23, 1894, the son of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles. His father, a zealously religious and intimidating man, and a teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, insisted that his son put aside his early interest in biology and instead enroll in Stevens to study engineering. After 2 lackluster years, Alfred rebelled and left for Bowdoin College in Maine, where he enrolled as a biology student. Father and son never reconciled; when Alfred graduated with high honors in 1916, his father refused to attend commencement. 1

Alfred became a student of applied biology at Harvard, where he came under the influence of William Morton Wheeler, an eminent field biologist, staunch Darwinian, and confidant of the irreverent H. L. Mencken. With Wheeler as his mentor, Kinsey jettisoned most of his religious ideas—although not all of his repressive upbringing—and embarked on a massive and meticulous Darwinian case study of the evolutionary taxonomy of the gall wasp. After identifying several new species, Kinsey received his doctor of science degree in 1919 and joined the faculty of Indiana University the following year. In 1924, he married Clara Bracken McMillen, then an outstanding chemistry student at Indiana University. Alfred and Clara had 4 children, 3 of whom survived into adulthood.

Kinsey advanced up the academic ranks, becoming full professor in 1929. 2 In 1936, he published The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study of the Origin of Species in 1930 and The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips . Although both were well received by specialists, Kinsey was deeply disappointed that he was not offered a professorship at a more prestigious university.

Perhaps because of this disappointment, Kinsey made an unusual career move in 1938: he agreed to lead a team-taught course on marriage and the family instituted in response to a student petition. High points of the course were Kinsey’s illustrated lectures on the biology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and the techniques of contraception, as were his spirited denunciations of repressive laws and social attitudes. He also attempted to replace conventional ideas of normal sexual behavior with a new biological definition: “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.” 3(p333) As his recent biographer James H. Jones observes, Kinsey was using the marriage course to “transform his private struggle against Victorian morality into a public crusade” and to “protest issues that had bedeviled him for decades.” 3(p335) The Indiana students responded enthusiastically, and his course enrollments grew to 400 by 1940.

Kinsey now shifted his research focus as well, transferring his obsessive concern with variation among gall wasps to the varieties of human sexual experience. He required students in his marriage course to have private conferences in which he took their sexual histories. On weekends and vacations, he conducted similar interviews in nearby communities, and later in such cities as Gary, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. Kinsey received research support from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed him to hire research assistants, expand the geographic scope of his work, and found the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947.

In January 1948, Kinsey and his collaborators published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the source of the excerpt reprinted here. It made the best-seller list within 3 weeks, despite its 804 pages, generally dry scientific style, and ponderous weight of statistics, tables, and graphs. By mid-March, it had sold 200 000 copies. The book, based on over 5000 sexual histories, provided a series of revelations about the prevalence of masturbation, adulterous sexual activity, and homosexuality. One religious leader attacked Kinsey for publishing “the most anti-religious book of our times.” 4 Some criticized his methods (and conclusions) because of inadequate sampling techniques; others extravagantly praised him as another Galileo or Darwin.

Kinsey’s next major project was Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953. Based on almost 6000 sexual histories, this book contained many revelations about such matters as women’s masturbatory practices, premarital sexuality, and orgasmic experiences. As before, Kinsey documented an enormous gap between social attitudes and actual practices. Also as before, the book was a media sensation, but this time the counterattack was so ferocious—including a congressional investigation of his financial support—that the Rockefeller Foundation terminated its funding.

Kinsey’s health deteriorated under the strain of public attack and uncertainty about the future of his institute. He suffered from heart disease and, after a brief hospitalization for pneumonia, died in Bloomington on August 25, 1956. In his own mind, his principal legacy was to have brought scientific rigor to the study of human sexuality. But as his biographer James H. Jones points out, Kinsey was not only a scientist; he was a reformer who sought to rid himself of his personal sexual demons, while at the same time revolutionizing the repressive society in which he had grown up:

His formative years were spent in a home and in a nation where many middle-class parents enshrouded sex in shame, heaping more than enough guilt on young people to mangle and twist them. This was particularly true for those like Kinsey who aspired but failed to achieve moral perfection. His great accomplishment was to take his pain and suffering and use it to transform himself into an instrument of social reform, a secular evangelist who proclaimed a new sensibility about human sexuality. 3(p772)

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20.1B: Sexual Behavior- Kinsey’s Study

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Learning Objectives

• Analyze the impact of Kinsey’s study of sexuality related to how it changed the public’s perception of sexuality and how people are sexually socialized

Dr. Alfred Kinsey was an American biologist who is considered to be the founder of sexology, or the scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behavior, and function. Kinsey trained as a biologist and entomologist at Harvard and obtained a teaching post at Indiana University. There, he became interested in human sexuality. In 1935, Kinsey delivered a lecture to a faculty discussion group where he attacked the “widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology” and advanced the notion that delayed sexual experience, or waiting to engage in sexual activity until marriage, was psychologically harmful. This lecture sparked intensive research that resulted in the Kinsey Report . The report refers to two different book publications based on his research of human sexuality: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). The books were widely read and Kinsey became a media star.

The Kinsey Report was the most extensive analysis of human sexuality conducted to its day. Data was gathered primarily by means of subjective interviews, conducted according to a structured questionnaire memorized by the experimenters. Significantly, the Kinsey research team went out and conducted the interviews themselves, rather than relying upon pre-collected data. What resulted was the largest collection of statistical information about adult sexuality in the United States.

The Kinsey Scale

A large section of the Kinsey Report was devoted to the idea of sexual orientation. The Kinsey Report is frequently invoked to support the common estimate of one in ten Americans being a homosexual. However, Kinsey disapproved of using terms like homosexual or heterosexual, as he firmly believed that sexuality is prone to change over time and that sexual behavior must be understood both as physical contact as well as purely psychological phenomena, such as desire, attraction, and fantasy. Instead of using the homosexual/heterosexual categorization, Kinsey developed the Kinsey Scale system. This system attempts to describe a person’s sexual history or episodes of sexual activity at a given point in time, rather than assigning an individual an overarching and permanent sexual orientation.

The scale ranked sexual behavior from zero to six, with zero being completely heterosexual and six being completely homosexual. As one can see, Kinsey rejected the idea of a permanent status of sexual orientation and instead chose to rely on a rating relating to a particular moment in one’s life, indicating that sexuality changes over time. Nevertheless, Kinsey’s Scale is effectively a segmented version of the hetero/homosexual binary, not allowing for other interpretations of sexuality. Kinsey’s associates actually added an additional category, X, to represent asexuals, or people who experience no sexual desire. In this way, Kinsey’s report is of its particular cultural and historical moment, in that it conceives of American sexuality as only occurring along this binary. According to Kinsey, 11.6% of white males aged 20 to 35 were given a rating of three for this period in their lives, meaning that they were equally heterosexual and homosexual. Kinsey further found that 7% of single females aged 20 to 35 and 4% of previously married females were given a rating of three for this period of their lives. The report also states that nearly 46% of the male interview subjects had “reacted” sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience.

Sexuality Within Marriage

The Kinsey study also gave statistics on sexuality within marriage that had never before been reported. According to Kinsey, the average frequency of marital sex reported by women in their late teens was 2.8 times per week, 2.2 times per week for women by the age of 30, and once per week by women by the age of 50. Kinsey estimated that approximately half of all married males had some extramarital experience at some point in their married lives. Among Kinsey’s sample, 26% of females had extramarital sex by their forties. Kinsey found that between 10 and 16% of married females aged 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex.

Critical Response

Kinsey’s report was wildly successful. The two books together sold over 750,000 copies and were translated into thirteen languages. They may be considered some of the most successful and influential scientific literature of the twentieth century. The reports are associated with a significant change in public perceptions of sexuality. A mere decade after the reports were published, the first oral contraceptive was introduced and the sexual revolution began. The sexual revolution was a social movement from the 1960s to the 1980s that increased acceptance of sex outside of marriage.

• Kinsey developed the Kinsey Scale, which was a numerical ranking of sexual behavior on a scale of complete heterosexuality to complete homosexuality.
• Kinsey’s open discussion of sexuality in the 1950s contributed to the sexual revolution of the following decade, in which social standards that limited sex to heterosexual marriage were loosened.
• The Kinsey Report is frequently invoked to support the common estimate of one in ten Americans being a homosexual.
• sexology : The study of sex and sexuality.
• sexual revolution : A period in which attitudes towards sexual behavior undergo a substantial change, usually in the direction of increased liberality.

Funding a Sexual Revolution: The Kinsey Reports

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It has been over seventy years since Alfred Kinsey published research findings asserting that people do not fit exclusively into binary sexual categories. What exists today as the well-known Kinsey scale was at mid-century a revolution in scientific understanding of human sexuality. Moreover, it has been a source of heated controversy ever since. The most well-known of the study’s conclusions asserts that only ten percent of the human population is fully heterosexual, and likewise only ten percent is exclusively homosexual. The rest of the population is spread across a “continuum” at points somewhere in between. This assertion transformed American society by challenging American attitudes toward sexual normalcy. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell R. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male . (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948).

But there is a much less well-known story about Kinsey and his research enterprise: that the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) funded much of his work. Why and how did a large foundation get involved in human sexuality research — and what was this funding relationship like, especially as the controversy heated up?

Funding Research on the “Problems of Sex”

Alfred Kinsey was a Harvard-trained entomologist studying wasp genetics at Indiana University when, in the late 1930s, he agreed to teach a course on marriage and reproduction. Theodore M. Brown and Elizabeth Fee, “Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer of Sex Research.” American Journal of Public Health . 2003 June; 93(6): 896-897. The course piqued his interest and marked a pivotal moment in his career, as he quickly shifted focus from insects to humans.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation was supporting the National Research Council’s (NRC) Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex . Established in 1922, the NRC Committee originally operated with funding from another Rockefeller-created agency, the Bureau of Social Hygiene . But when the Bureau ceased operations in 1933, the NRC Committee continued to fund projects with direct support from the RF.

In 1941, the NRC Committee took notice of Kinsey’s research.

Prior to their support of Kinsey, NRC Committee members had typically been conservative in their funding decisions, opting to support studies of animal rather than human sexuality. Their decision to support Kinsey was a radical shift, which RF staff and leaders ultimately stood behind for years.

Taking a Gamble on a New Field

Kinsey’s first NRC grant in 1941 amounted to $1,600. By 1947, Kinsey’s project was allotted $40,000 annually in NRC funding, which in turn came entirely from the Rockefeller Foundation. A testament to the priority placed on Kinsey’s work, fully half of all annual RF contributions to the NRC Committee went to his sex research. The funding history is summarized in a January 10, 1949 letter. “ Excerpt from letter of chairman to director of Division of Medical Sciences, Rockefeller Foundation, through Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council, ” Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Foundation Staff Take Notice of Kinsey

The Foundation funds made it to Kinsey through the intermediary of NRC expertise and testimony, but very soon, RF staff members themselves began to pay attention. Medical Sciences Director Alan Gregg met with Kinsey in 1943, and described the zoologist as “attractive in manner and impressive in his account of his work.” Gregg viewed Kinsey’s research program as “quite extraordinary.” Excerpt from Officer’s Diary, “ Alan Gregg ,” September 3, 1943, Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 12, F-L Rockefeller Archive Center.

The following year, when Kinsey worried that the RF might be trying to distance itself publicly from sex research, Gregg assured him that “neither I personally nor this Division of the Foundation nor the Foundation as a whole wishes to have or has thought of any repudiation of your work.” Letter from Alan Gregg to Alfred C. Kinsey, “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey ,” September 8, 1944, Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Alfred C. Kinsey [is] attractive in manner and impressive in his account of his work. Alan Gregg, 1943

By 1944, however, Kinsey was encountering logistical problems due to wartime rationing and the difficulty of obtaining draft deferments for graduate researchers. But there were far graver risks, given the work’s taboo topic.

“We have been arrested, investigated by sheriffs, and repeatedly stood up by the police” Kinsey wrote in a letter to Gregg. Alfred C. Kinsey to Alan Gregg, “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey ,” August 26, 1944, Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center. But Gregg’s support for the work was unwavering, and two years later, Kinsey formally thanked Gregg for “the personal interest that you have taken in this work and the intelligent understanding you have had of the problems which we have faced.” Alfred C. Kinsey to Alan Gregg, “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey ,” April 16, 1946. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

The relationship between Kinsey and Gregg was so strong that in 1947 Gregg agreed to write an introduction to Kinsey’s forthcoming publication under his own name, independent of his role at the RF.

Promising Research on Non-Binary Sexuality

Added to Gregg’s optimism were professional reports he heard about Kinsey, which emerged from experts in many disciplinary quarters. In March 1945, for example, Gregg noted in his officer’s diary that “psychoanalysts think Kinsey’s work will advance the status of psychoanalysis by 50 years.” Diary entry attachment to letter from Alan Gregg to Alfred C. Kinsey, March 7, 1945, Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Medical researcher George W. Corner of the NRC Committee also wrote with praise for Kinsey’s methodology. Responding to concerns about the approach used in the research, Corner wrote in 1946 that he was “convinced that in research on sex behavior, personal interviews conducted with great skill and with all the precautions Dr. Kinsey has learned by experience will elicit information that is correct and comprehensive to a degree impossible by any other means.” “ Memorandum by George W. Corner ,” January 24, 1946. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Among the NRC Committee itself, the mood was hopeful and confident. Robert M. Yerkes, the chairman of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, wrote to a colleague in 1946: “Beyond doubt Alfred Kinsey is an extraordinarily gifted interviewer. He has rare tact, sympathetic insight, ability to win confidence, disinterestedness, objectivity, and directness.” He concluded his letter with the bold assertion that “Alfred Kinsey is in the midst of an epoch-making socio-biological inquiry.” Letter from Robert M. Yerkes to Lewis H. Weed, January 24, 1946. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Amidst this atmosphere of good faith, RF funding was especially secure with Alan Gregg as the project’s internal champion. The grants helped fund a team of assistants who conducted, collected, and analyzed thousands of interviews with men and women meant to represent a social and economic cross-section of America. The only limiting factor, according to Gregg and Kinsey alike, was the amount of time it took to train new interviewers and analysts.

Nevertheless, Kinsey was conscious that RF leadership yearned to see results sooner rather than later. He wrote to Gregg in 1946: “I think our productiveness in the next three years will please the trustees. I am glad that your trustees now know as much about the research as you have described to them.” “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey, ” Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Alfred Kinsey is in the midst of an epoch-making socio-biological inquiry. Robert M. Yerkes, 1946

The Kinsey Team’s Interviews

Kinsey used thousands of interviews to build a set of case histories that provided statistical data from which to draw more generalized conclusions about the sexual experiences of Americans.

Even today, descriptions of Kinsey’s work tend to dwell on his interview techniques. NRC Committee member Corner volunteered as an interview subject in 1946, in order to familiarize himself further with the project. In a memorandum following the interview, Corner remarked:

“These experiences made me quite confident that Dr. Kinsey is able by his methods of questioning, to elicit frank, full and complete histories of sex conduct. The expertness of the questioning becomes even more apparent on thinking it over afterward. In the first place, the subject is made to feel that Dr. Kinsey is disinterested and sympathetic at the same time. It is disarming to be asked innocuous questions first – what work, for example, one’s father did, and where did one live in childhood. The intimate questions slip in sideways and by degrees. When at last the subject realizes that he is speaking of things he perhaps never put into words before, he is relieved to find that his questioner evinces neither surprise, amusement, nor condemnation.” “Memorandum by George W. Corner ,” (January 24, 1946), Rockefeller Foundation records, Record Group 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Publication at Last

The product of the research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , was published in 1948. It reached academic and popular audiences alike, inspiring both praise and condemnation.

The book’s revolutionary assertion was that sexual diversity was normal. Most famously, Kinsey argued that human sexuality could be mapped onto a continuum from heterosexual to homosexual, rather than fitting only into one of those two simple categories.

As Kinsey and his co-authors explain, “Males do not represent two discrete populations, homosexual and heterosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. Only the human mind invents categories to force facts into separate pigeonholes.” Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, 638.

Commercial Success…and Controversy

The eight-hundred-page book was a commercial success, hitting the best-seller list within a few short weeks. This was especially remarkable given that its publisher, W.B. Saunders, was previously known only by the medical community. Brown and Fee, “Alfred C. Kinsey: A Pioneer of Sex Research.”

But the volume ignited the ire of some members of the public. While many praised Kinsey’s findings, comparing the entomologist-turned-sexologist to such groundbreaking intellectuals as Darwin or Marx, others were quite critical of his work.

The head of Catholic University’s Department of Religious Education, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy, called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male “the most anti-religious” book of the time. “Sheehy Attacks Kinsey Report,” Washington Post (November 14, 1948): M19. Op. Cit. R. Marie Griffith, “The Religious Encounters of Alfred C. Kinsey” The Journal of American History Vol. 95, No. 2 (September 2008): 349. Others claimed that Kinsey was giving a carte blanche to sexual deviants, sometimes to a criminal degree, and contributing to a moral crisis among the American public.

RF leaders did not find these attacks alarming. In fact, the critiques were milder and fewer in number than many expected. Trustee James Dickey encapsulated the general RF mood in a letter to RF Trustee and President Elect Chester Barnard in June 1948:

“I have not taken the controversy concerning [the Kinsey Report] very seriously. I have long since accepted the fact that any substantial public consideration of this subject is bound to draw fire, and in so far as I have followed the current reaction I very much agree with you that it is far less than I expected might be the case.” Letter from James S. Dickey to Chester I. Barnard, June 30, 1948. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Scientific Criticism

More unsettling for a foundation known for working in science, medicine, and public health, however, were the scientific criticisms following the book’s publication. Some psychiatrists complained that Kinsey, who had previously focused on insects, lacked the requisite background to understand the complexity of the human sexuality he studied.

In a 1948 letter to Gregg, psychiatrist Lawrence S. Kubie wrote “… the main defect is that he has not understood the problems of sex deeply enough even to know what the questions are which should be asked in such a study.” Letter from Lawrence S. Kubie to Alan Gregg (June 16, 1948). Rockefeller Foundation records, Record Group 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Then there were methodological critiques of Kinsey’s work, which still persist. Scholars argued that his interview subjects did not come from sufficiently diverse backgrounds. Those willing to be included in the study were most often white and college educated, leaving religious conservatives, working class whites, and African Americans under-represented. In decades since, critics have pointed out that many of Kinsey’s subjects were incarcerated or divulged criminal activities in the course of their interviews. The ethical frameworks of the era regarding human subjects provided little guidance, and thus the Kinsey team did not report the crimes revealed.

Reviewing Kinsey’s Methods

A basic assumption about the data also came under fire. Critics suggested that probability sampling, which uses smaller but more representative samples, would have led to more accurate conclusions. And yet, as a trained zoologist who had studied hundreds of thousands of wasps, Kinsey was steadfast in maintaining that a greater number of subjects would always lead to better conclusions.

The Rockefeller Foundation even sent a team of statisticians to Indiana University to review Kinsey’s methodology. While the team and Kinsey agreed on a number of points, ultimately Kinsey rejected their recommendation that he work with smaller sample groups.

Grant Success, But No Funding Future?

Given the commercial success of Kinsey’s first publication, RF leadership began to question whether the project really needed further grant funds. Writing in his December 1948 officer’s diary, Gregg noted the “rather unusual circumstances” of the project. Never before had a grantee produced a best-seller whose royalties dwarfed the grant that helped produce it in the first place. Excerpt, “ Alan Gregg, ” Officer Diary (December 17, 1948). Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 12, Rockefeller Archive Center. RF leadership now expected that book royalties would cover future research costs.

Internally, Gregg suggested a gradual decrease in support for National Research Council sex research. When Kinsey heard of these plans, he reached out to Gregg. In a two-page letter, Kinsey outlined thirteen arguments in favor of continued support. The very first one focused on the optics, arguing that “[d]iscontinuation of Rockefeller Foundation support at this juncture of our program will be taken by the population at large as a vote of no confidence in the research.” Letter from Alfred Kinsey to Alan Gregg (April 2, 1949). Rockefeller Foundation records, Record Group 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

Support Again Secured (Temporarily)

In May 1949 members of the RF board agreed to continue NRC support for the next three years, provided that Kinsey’s book royalties would also be funneled back into the research. Expressing his approval for the decision, RF trustee Walter W. Stewart wrote to RF president Chester Barnard:

“Personally I have no doubt as to the wisdom and appropriateness of continued support for the work of Dr. Kinsey. Even though some of the publicity attending the publication of his Report may have been unfortunate, the Foundation is not responsible for that. It is not improbable that these studies in the field of sex may come to be regarded as one of the great contributions of Foundation work. As you point out in your letter, work in this taboo area is certain to arouse emotional attitudes. I am glad the Committee did not let this consideration prevent it from granting the additional financial support called for in the resolution.” Letter from Walter W. Stewart to Chester Barnard (June 10, 1948). Rockefeller Foundation records, Record Group 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.

…work in this taboo area is certain to arouse emotional attitudes.” Walter W. Stewart, Rockefeller Foundation Trustee, 1949

Kinsey’s Second Book, on the Second Sex

Later, after his research team conducted another several thousand interviews, in 1953 Kinsey published a second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female . This book, which dissected the sex lives of American women, provoked even more interest and outrage from the general public than had the volume on males.

This time, however, the book also became a political weapon on the U.S. House floor.

Published in an era of suspicion and anti-communist hysteria, the Kinsey reports were used against the RF in congressional investigations. Citing Kinsey, one congressional committee accused the RF of helping to weaken American morality, thereby aiding the cause of communism. For more on the Cox and Reece Investigations of private foundations in the early 1950s, see Rockefeller Foundation records, Cox and Reece Investigations , Rockefeller Archive Center.

The End of Rockefeller Foundation -Supported Sex Research

RF funding for sex research projects came to an end in 1954. By then, Alan Gregg had been promoted to vice president, and no longer oversaw (or protected) the grant. Oversight now fell to Warren Weaver, a longtime senior RF staff member who had worked with Gregg for decades and who headed the Foundation’s Division Natural Sciences and Agriculture. Weaver vehemently opposed the Kinsey funding. All in all, the RF reached a point where the controversy surrounding the books had become wearying, and where it decided that Kinsey’s financial success should enable it to cut ties.

While Kinsey’s royalty profits were indeed considerable, he scrambled to find alternative sources of funding for his work and his institute after the RF withdrew its support. Kinsey died in 1956, leaving much of his research unpublished.

What is now known as the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University has since reanalyzed the RF-funded data. Significant new studies have emerged, and methodology has evolved since the pioneering work of the 1940s and 1950s. It goes without saying that the issues Kinsey and his team were exploring continue to prompt scientific, political, and social debates. Nevertheless, many critics and supporters alike still trace the origins of the twentieth-century sexual revolution to Alfred C. Kinsey.

Further Reading

• Leslie J. Harris, “ The White Slavery Controversy, Women’s Bodies, and the Making of Public Space in the United States .” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, 2019.
• Eva Payne, “ Purifying the World: Americans and International Sexual Reform, 1865-1933 .” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, 2017.
• Jennifer Lisa Koslow, “ The Pervasive Use of Exhibits for Public Health Education. ” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, 2011.

Research This Topic in the Archives

Explore this topic by viewing records, many of which are digitized, through our online archival discovery system.

• “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey ,” 1943-1949 April. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects (Grants), Record Group 1, Subgroup 1.1, United States, Series 200, United States – General (No Program), Subseries 200.GEN, Rockefeller Archive Center.
• “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey ,” 1949 May-1954. Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects (Grants), Record Group 1, Subgroup 1.1, United States, Series 200, United States – General (No Program), Subseries 200.GEN, Rockefeller Archive Center.

This story is an expansion of a piece historian Theresa Iacobelli published in 2013 as “Kinsey Reports,” as part of an online exhibit called 100 Years: The Rockefeller Foundation (later retitled The Rockefeller Foundation. A Digital History ). The exhibit was migrated to its current home on RE:source in 2022.

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Tucked into an Indiana town is a world-renowned institute for sexual behavior research

In an episode of the black-and-white classic show " I Love Lucy ," Lucy, in her usual fluster of creative problem solving, pretends to be taking a door-to-door poll.

"We're, uh, we're conducting a poll, and we'd like to ask you some questions."

"Say," the woman at the door replies. "Your name ain't Kinsey, is it?"

That episode aired in the 1950s, when renowned sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey had been at Indiana University in Bloomington for more than three decades. In 1947 he and his research team established a nonprofit corporation affiliated with Indiana University that in 1981 was renamed in his honor.

Here's what you need to know about his history in Indiana.

THE LATEST: IU delays vote on spinning off Kinsey Institute after backlash, concerns over academic freedom

Who was Alfred Kinsey?

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born in 1894 and studied biology and psychology at Bowdoin College and Harvard University, according to a biography published by the Kinsey Institute . He became an assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University in 1920.

He spent years researching gall wasps across North America, gathering specimens and noting their subtle differences. Those same techniques would guide his work studying the nuances of human sexual behavior.

Kinsey began teaching a course on marriage after women studying at IU petitioned the school to offer it to married or engaged students. This led to his discovery that there wasn't much available in the scientific community about human sexual behavior. He began recording anonymous sex histories from his students and others throughout the state and developed data coding to parse through the information he collected.

In 1948, he published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," followed by "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1963. The response to these volumes turned Kinsey into a household name even "Lucy" viewers would recognize.

Kinsey died in 1956 and is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington next to his wife, Clara, who died in 1982.

What is the Kinsey Institute?

According to the institute's website, it was founded in 1947 by Kinsey and his research team. At the time, it was called the Institute for Sex Research. It was renamed the Kinsey Insitute in the 1980s.

The institute hosts a library and special collection of print materials, film, art, photography and archives spanning more than 2,000 years of human history.

Today, the Kinsey Institute's primary goals are to continue research on sexual behavior and provide resources for researchers in various disciplines. Its research "seeks to illuminate the most intimate and formative aspects of our lives," according to the website.

What is the Kinsey Scale?

After recording the sexual histories of thousands of people, Kinsey's team created a scale to show the spectrum of sexuality. Instead of categorizing people as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual, it used a six-point scale ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual.

Why have there been protests against the Kinsey Institute?

Decades old claims about the Kinsey Institute have led to protests from various groups due to the nature of its research. In 2019, the Bloomington Herald-Times reported that about 50 people from an organization called the Protect Child Health Coalition staged a protest on IU's campus.

The activists based their protest on claims dating back to the 1980s that the institute was promoting sex research on children and that Kinsey relied on pedophiles in his research. Pedophiles were indeed some of the many people whose sex diaries were included in the research, but records show no evidence that Kinsey or anyone on his team ever witnessed acts of pedophilia or asked subjects to participate in sex acts with children.

“They’ve repeated things that have been repeated for years and have been debunked. It’s just not true, and what they’re alleging is going on now is just not true. There is no research that is being done on children, and we do not promote the things they’re saying we do,” IU spokesman Chuck Carney told the Herald-Times in 2019. “We appreciate their concern, but it’s based on false information.”

How has legislation affected Kinsey Institute funding?

In early 2023, Indiana Rep. Lorissa Sweet, R-Wabash, proposed cutting funding to the Kinsey Institute as an amendment to the state budget proposal. The two Bloomington state lawmakers opposed the idea, but it passed both chambers.

Sweet also alluded to the previously debunked accusations about the institute, saying “I would rather the institute face investigations for potential child sex crimes they are hiding. Having them lose their funding is a great place to start.”

IU President Pamela Whitten condemned the action by the Indiana General Assembly, the Herald-Times reported .

"The university is concerned that a provision singling out a specific research institute sets a troubling precedent with implications that could limit the ability of public colleges and universities to pursue research and scholarship that benefits people and improves lives," Whitten wrote in a public statement.

What happened at the November 2023 IU Trustees meeting?

The Indiana University Board of Trustees was expected to vote on a measure to sever ties with the Kinsey Institute on Friday, Nov. 10. Amid backlash, including a petition with more than 7,000 signatures, the board delayed the vote.

IndyStar reporters Binghui Huang and Cate Charron; and Herald-Times reporters Rachel Smith and Emily Ernsberger contributed to this report.

Alfred Kinsey

Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.

(1894-1956)

Alfred Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In 1947, he incorporated under the name, the Institute for Sex Research, Inc. In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , followed by a sequel in 1953. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died in Bloomington, Indiana, from complications caused by congestive heart failure.

Alfred Charles Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, to engineering professor Alfred Seguine Kinsey and his wife, Sarah (Charles) Kinsey, in the tenement town of Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the oldest of three children in a devout Methodist family. Alfred Kinsey's mother described her firstborn son as, "shy and soft spoken."

In 1912, Kinsey graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He worked to fund his undergraduate education while attending Bowdoin College, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in biology and psychology in 1916. In 1920, Kinsey received a doctorate degree in biology from Harvard University. He met his future wife, Clara McMillan, at a zoology department picnic that same year.

Shortly after earning his doctorate at Harvard, Kinsey accepted a job as a professor in the zoology department at Indiana University in Bloomington. A specialist in botany and insects, through his research, Kinsey established himself as the No. 1 authority on the gall wasp. From 1926 to 1929, he took field trips all over the country with his students, collecting tens of thousands of gall wasp specimens along the way. He focused intently on categorizing and numbering his specimens, but longed to take his scientific investigation a step further. Turning his focus to questions of evolution and natural selection, in 1930—a year after he was promoted to full professor—Kinsey published his findings in a paper called The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of the Species.

Sexual Behavior Studies

In the 1930s, Kinsey agreed to teach a marriage course. When his students starting asking him questions about sex, Kinsey realized there was very little scientific data on the matter. He decided to apply the principles of scientific research toward the topic of sexual behavior. In 1938, he launched a sex studies program. In the early 1940s, he procured funding from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation's Medical Division. In 1947, Kinsey and his research assistants became incorporated under the name the Institute for Sex Research, Inc.

In 1948, Kinsey published his first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male . He based the book on more than 10,000 interviews—during which men and women of all ages provided candid answers to personal questions about their sexual feelings and behaviors. The book quickly sold close to 500,000 copies. Kinsey used the royalties from the sales of his book to do more research. He came out with a sequel called Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953, but it didn't sell as well as his first book.

Because Kinsey's research dealt openly with human sexuality during a time when the topic was taboo, his work was the subject of much controversy. During the course of his study, Kinsey was subjected to anti-Communist investigations, loss of funding and a lawsuit by U.S. Customs over a collection of erotic photos. Nevertheless, Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research still survives today, under the new title the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

During the last six months of Kinsey's life, his health steadily declined as he gradually developed congestive heart failure. On August 25, 1956, Kinsey died at Bloomington Hospital in Bloomington, Indiana. A few days earlier, he had bruised his leg after tripping in his garden, and the bruise had developed into a deadly embolism. Kinsey was 62 years old at the time of his passing. He was survived by his wife, Clara, and their three children.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Alfred Kinsey
• Birth Year: 1894
• Birth date: June 23, 1894
• Birth State: New Jersey
• Birth City: Hoboken
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.
• Science and Medicine
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Bowdoin College
• Harvard University
• Occupations
• Anthropologist
• Death Year: 1956
• Death date: August 25, 1956
• Death State: Indiana
• Death City: Bloomington
• Death Country: United States
• We are recorders and reporters of the facts—not judges of the behavior we describe.
• The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

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What Is the Kinsey Scale?

The spectrum of human sexual orientation

Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

Nick Blackmer is a librarian, fact-checker, and researcher with more than 20 years’ experience in consumer-oriented health and wellness content. He keeps a DSM-5 on hand just in case.

Javier Zayas Photography / Getty Images

Origins of the Kinsey Scale

• How It Works
• Limitations

The Kinsey Scale was created by pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin, who called it the Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale. It was first introduced in their book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948.

Although it has a number of limitations, the Kinsey Scale was groundbreaking when it was initially published because it was the first scientific scale to suggest that human sexuality and sexual attraction are a continuum and not limited to solely heterosexual or homosexual orientations.

This article discusses the origins of the Kinsey scale, what the scale tells you, and how it works. It also explains the limitations of the scale and its impact on the study of human sexual orientation .

Kinsey, a biologist, and his team studied human sexual behavior, preferences, thoughts, and feelings by interviewing thousands of people, with Kinsey alone conducting 8,000 interviews.

Kinsey found that 37% of the men he interviewed had a same-sex experience sometime between adolescence and old age, a rate that jumped to 50% for unmarried men by the age of 35.

Meanwhile, of the women he interviewed, 13% had a same-sex experience. This research made it clear that human sexuality couldn't be defined as exclusively heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

As a result, Kinsey and his colleagues created the Kinsey Scale, which classifies people into eight categories that represent a spectrum of human sexual orientation.

How the Kinsey Scale Works

The Kinsey Scale ranges from 0 to 6 and includes an additional category labeled "X." Here are the various ratings and their definitions:

• 0 : Exclusively opposite sex/heterosexual behavior or attraction
• 1 : Predominantly heterosexual, but slightly inclined to be attracted to the same sex or engage in homosexual behavior
• 2 : Predominantly heterosexual, but more than slightly inclined to be attracted to the same sex or engage in homosexual behavior
• 3 : Equally heterosexual and homosexual behavior or attraction
• 4 : Predominantly homosexual, but more than slightly inclined to be attracted to the opposite sex or engage in heterosexual behavior
• 5 : Predominantly homosexual, but slightly inclined to be attracted to the opposite sex or engage in heterosexual behavior
• 6 : Exclusively same-sex/homosexual behavior or attraction
• X : No socio-sexual contacts or reaction/ asexual

Kinsey and his colleagues used the scale to categorize the individuals they interviewed. Consequently, no official Kinsey "test" exists to go with the scale, even though such tests have been created by others and many can be found online.

Using the Kinsey Scale

Instead, to use the Kinsey Scale, you simply assign yourself to the category that best defines you. However, the Scale has many limitations that may make it impossible to feel if one of the categories accurately sums up your sexual preferences.

In addition, sexuality often changes over time, so even if you assign yourself a category on the Scale now, you may find another category that fits you better in the future.

Limitations of the Kinsey Scale

While the Kinsey Scale changed perceptions of human sexuality, it didn't fully capture the complexity and nuance of sexual behavior and attraction. Based on current understandings of sexuality, the scale is limited by the following listed below.

It Doesn't Account for All Sexualities

The entirety of human sexuality isn't encompassed by the Scale's heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual categories. Today, people identify as pansexual , demisexual , and many other orientations that make up a rich tapestry of sexual behavior and attraction.

It Assumes Heterosexuality and Homosexuality Are Opposites

The Kinsey Scale is structured so that homosexuality and heterosexuality are inversely related. Thus, according to the Scale, the more someone identifies as heterosexual, the less they identify as homosexual and vice versa.

However, studies show opposite-sex and same-sex attraction are not related to one another but are experienced separately. As a result, homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality should be considered independent constructs.

It Conflates Sexual Behavior and Attraction

The Scale categorizes people based on sexual behavior and attraction, but these are two different things that often don't correspond.

For example, a man might be attracted to both men and women but only engage in sexual behavior with women.

Moreover, the Scale doesn't account for a third category: sexual identity, or the label an individual uses for their sexual orientation. For instance, the man in the above example may refer to himself as heterosexual, even though he clearly experiences some homosexual attraction.

Ultimately, his sexual behavior, attraction, and identity don't match up and therefore can't be accurately captured by the categories on the Kinsey Scale.

It Assumes Gender Is Binary

The Scale also works off the assumption that people identify as either men or women, while completely overlooking the existence of trans, intersex , or other gender identities , further limiting who the Scale can be applied to.

Impact of the Kinsey Scale and Alternative Scales

Despite its limitations, the Kinsey Scale has been highly influential. When it initially came out in 1948, homosexuality was outlawed in every state in America due to sodomy laws and the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual included homosexuality as a mental health disorder.

Kinsey introduced an entirely new way of thinking about sexuality and what's "normal" into this environment, paving the way for further research and changing perceptions about homosexuality and the range of human sexual experiences.

It Birthed New Scales

Today, there are more than 200 scales that measure sexual orientation. Two that provide a more comprehensive picture of human sexuality, specifically mentioned by the Kinsey Institute , are the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid and the Storms Sexuality Axis.

• The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid was created by Fritz Klein in 1978. It includes seven items, including sexual behavior, sexual attraction, and sexual fantasies . For each item, respondents rate their preferences at three points in time: past, present, and ideal.
• The Storms Sexuality Axis was created by Michael D. Storms in 1980. It plots sexual orientation along an X-Y axis that expands on Kinsey's ideas about attraction to the same or the opposite sex while also considering more categories of asexuality and bisexuality.

According to a 2012 study, the Kinsey Scale has found new life online despite the proliferation of more inclusive scales. For those questioning their sexual identity, the versions of the Kinsey Scale that are available across the internet help them better understand and explore their sexuality.

The study concluded that for those attempting to define their sexual identity beyond homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual orientations, the Scale helps expand their ideas of how they can define themselves. The Scaler also enables them to choose different placements on the Scale over time as their understanding of their sexual identity shifts.

In addition, the online forums associated with these scales offer an opportunity to discuss their perceptions of their sexuality and find affirmation as they decide which sexual identity fits them best.

Bullough VL. Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey report: historical overview and lasting contributions .  J Sex Res . 1998;35(2):127-131. doi:10.1080/00224499809551925

Kinsey AC, Pomeroy WR, Martin CE. Sexual behavior in the human male .  Am J Public Health . 2003;93(6):894-898. doi:10.2105/ajph.93.6.894

Kinsey Institute. Diversity of sexual orientation ,

Zietsch BP, Sidari MJ. The Kinsey scale is ill-suited to most sexuality research because it does not measure a single construct .  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2020;117(44):27080-27080. doi:10.1073/pnas.2015820117

Putka S. Is the Kinsey scale of sexual behavior still valid? Discover Magazine .

Storms MD. Theories of sexual orientation . J Pers Soc Psychol . 1980;38(5):783-792. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.38.5.783

Drucker DJ. Marking sexuality from 0–6: the Kinsey scale in online culture .  Sex Cult . 2012;16(3):241-262. doi:10.1007/s12119-011-9122-1

By Cynthia Vinney, PhD Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

The Research Error That Gave Us the Phrase ‘Missionary Position’

By ellen gutoskey | may 4, 2024.

In his 1972 sex manual The Joy of Sex , author Alex Comfort described “matrimonial” sex, in which a man is on top of a supine woman, as “the good old Adam and Eve missionary position.”

Though missionary is by no means exclusive to that gender pairing, the fact that some people just recently learned so while watching 2023’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves that Comfort’s representation from over half a century ago still has some gas in the cultural relevance tank.

Missionary position, if in stereotype only, is the kind of vanilla sex favored by husbands and wives either too in love to unlock eyes or too lazy to try something else. It’s chaste enough to have made the final cut of a Marvel movie and so strongly associated with baby-making ( sans scientific evidence , mind you) that even the medieval Catholic Church gave it a gold stamp . 

With that perception in mind, you can see how the position, in all its Adam-and-Eve glory, ended up with a religious nickname.

But that’s not how it happened. In fact, missionaries were mostly involved in this christening by mistake.

“The Way Squares Peg Round Holes”

Many a modern reader could glance at some datasets from Alfred Kinsey ’s 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male or its 1953 follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , and spot flaws in the research (e.g. nearly all the survey participants were white). But for an American society starved for candid discussions about sex , the Kinsey reports were easy to take at face value when they first hit shelves. Both volumes achieved something not many statistical studies ever aspire to, let alone accomplish: They became bestsellers.

Even as researchers turned a critic’s eye on Kinsey’s work during the back half of the 20th century, certain details escaped further interrogation. One of them was the origin of the phrase missionary position .

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , to illustrate that the missionary position—or “the English-American position”—was far from global, Kinsey referenced anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s 1929 text about the Indigenous communities of Papua New Guinea’s Trobriand Islands. Malinowski, Kinsey wrote , “notes that caricatures of the English-American position are performed around the communal campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the ‘missionary position.’” The implication was that the Indigenous islanders had learned this ridiculous copulation formation from Christian missionaries.

By the time English speakers embraced the term missionary position in full force during the sexual revolution, some had also begun to scorn the thing itself. Plenty of sexually liberated women continued to favor the bottom spot, but reactionaries tended to fixate on the notion that all this experimentation made missionary seem stuffy and uncool. One 1970 piece in The Guardian called it “the tatty old missionary position,” while a 1973 one in The Montreal Star described it as “the way squares peg round holes.”

It wasn’t just the phrase that got picked up from the Kinsey reports. Its origin story did, too, repeated (and often embellished) in everything from academic articles to newspaper advice columns. In a 1976 edition of The Ottawa Citizen , for example, advisor Dr. Aaron Rutledge asserted that missionary “was taught to Pacific Islanders and African tribespeople as the one religiously approved approach to husband-wife sexuality.”

But even if the good doctor hadn’t botched Kinsey’s account, he still would have accidentally been spreading misinformation —because Kinsey’s account wasn’t accurate in the first place.

“Sketchy and Flabby Movements”

Around the early 2000s, anthropologist and missiologist Robert J. Priest did something that countless scholars before him apparently hadn’t troubled to do: He read Malinowski’s 1929 book to locate the original reference to missionary position .

Curiously, not once does that exact term appear in the text. What Priest did find, which he laid out in a 2001 paper published in Current Anthropology , were other elements of Kinsey’s anecdote.

At one point, Malinowski chronicled the Trobriand people convening under a full moon (not around campfires, as Kinsey said) to play games and sing songs that sometimes involved sexual jokes . At another point, while outlining the islanders’ customary sex positions, Malinowski mentioned that they “despise the European position and consider it unpractical and improper.” He wasn’t talking about all arrangements wherein a woman is lying on her back—many of which were popular in the community—but specifically the one where the man subjects her to his whole body weight. In their words, per Malinowski, “he presses her heavily downwards, she cannot respond.”

“Altogether the natives are certain that white men do not know how to carry out intercourse effectively,” he wrote. They did, as Kinsey alluded to, enjoy caricaturing what Malinowski described as “the sketchy and flabby movements” and “the brevity and lack of vigour of the European performance.” 

Though they reportedly learned those ways from “white traders, planters, or officials,” Malinowski did mention missionaries in a later section about public displays of affection like “holding hands, leaning against each other, [and] embracing.” A man named Tokolibeba told him that this frowned-upon behavior, which some Trobriander couples had adopted from missionaries, was called “ misinari si bubunela ,” or “missionary fashion.”

In short, it seems that Kinsey may have conflated several true stories into one succinct and specious one. As Priest put it, “Kinsey apparently invented a legend while believing himself to be reporting historical fact and coined a new expression while thinking he was reporting an old one.”

It’s a mark of Kinsey’s influence that the expression’s origin went more or less unquestioned for so long. And also an indicator that most people thinking about sex probably aren’t too hung up on how any given position got its name.

Discover More Fascinating Phrase Origins:

Kinsey Institute to remain at Indiana University after Board of Trustees vote

The Kinsey Institute will remain at Indiana University and not be transformed into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit , after IU administration changed course and asked the Board of Trustees to pursue accounting solutions to keep the institute at IU.

The administration's proposal, which the trustees approved unanimously, says IU will work with the  Indiana State Board of Accounts to ensure compliance with an Indiana law passed last year that barred state dollars from coming to the institute .

“With the action taken today, we are taking steps to ensure that the Kinsey Institute remains a beacon of intellectual inquiry,” IU President Pamela Whitten said in a statement . “I offer my thanks to the Board of Trustees for their unwavering commitment and support.”

The proposal and vote came as a surprise to many at the Kinsey Institute, who were expecting Whitten to propose severing the institute into a separate nonprofit. Despite pressure from the public and Kinsey Institute, IU had, for months, seemed poised to move forward with a plan to sever the institute into a nonprofit to ensure state funds were kept separate.

Melissa Blundell, a research assistant at the Kinsey Institute who attended the March 1 trustees meeting, said she was pleased with the board's decision and believes keeping the institute within IU's operations will protect it.

"It was exactly what we wanted," Blundell said. "The proposal to sever it left Kinsey vulnerable to being dissolved entirely. As part of IU's legacy, this is incredibly important to make sure that it can remain at IU and remain safe."

Reach Brian Rosenzweig at [email protected] .

Paul Kinsey named 2024 College of Arts and Sciences Alumni of the Year

Paul Kinsey is a foreign language and international business graduate who spent his career traveling around the world. After graduating from MSU in 1987, he furthered his education at Georgia State University, earning an MBA. Kinsey’s globetrotting-career journey began at Threads USA, where he worked as director of international sales. He later joined US Air (US Airways) and assumed progressive roles in areas including operational oversight, emergency response planning, and labor negotiations/relations over the next 25 years. His work contributed to the organization’s mergers with America West Airlines, followed by American Airlines. 

Upon retiring from American Airlines in 2019, Kinsey joined Starkville-based real estate brokerage Mississippi Magnolia as director of operations in 2022. He is grateful for the influence of several MSU faculty mentors he gained as a student and credits their guidance for much of his academic and professional success. 

In return, he has generously invested in scholarship support to assist current and future Bulldog students. The Trenton, Tennessee native considers Tupelo his true home, and now resides in Starkville near his beloved alma mater. 

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The term “FemTech” was first coined in 2016 by entrepreneur Ida Tin. In the course of just a few years, it has grown to encompass a range of technology-enabled, consumer-centric products and solutions.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative, global effort by Emma Kemble, Lucy Pérez , Valentina Sartori , Gila Tolub , and Alice Zheng, representing views from McKinsey’s Healthcare Systems & Services Practice.

For purposes of this research, we analyzed 763 FemTech companies, designated as largely tech-enabled, consumer-centric solutions addressing women’s health, excluding biopharma and incumbent medical devices. We included select nondigital consumer products (with materials science innovations), devices (that are patient friendly), and health clinics (that are consumer-centric). We excluded companies that are more than 20 years old or are not focused exclusively on women’s health (diagnostics, supplements, telemedicine). Companies with both men’s and women’s health solutions were included in the data set but were excluded from funding calculations.

In the course of just a few years, FemTech has grown to encompass a range of technology-enabled, consumer-centric products and solutions.

FemTech provides a wide range of solutions to improve healthcare for women across a number of female-specific conditions, including maternal health, menstrual health, pelvic and sexual health, fertility, menopause, and contraception, as well as a number of general health conditions that affect women disproportionately or differently (such as osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease). While it’s still early days, our research indicates that the dynamics underlying FemTech are accelerating: public awareness, company formation, and funding are surging (Exhibit 1).

FemTech companies are already validating their investment hypotheses. Among others, Progyny, which manages fertility benefits for employers, went public in 2019 at a valuation in excess of $1 billion; its current market capitalization is about $4 billion. And Maven Clinic, a virtual clinic for women’s and family health, was valued at more than $1 billion in a recent Series D investment. In fact, the opportunities for multiple players, including investors, researchers, providers, payers, and legacy pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, are becoming increasingly evident.

A market of opportunity

Depending on scope, estimates for FemTech’s current market size range from $500 million to $1 billion. Forecasts suggest opportunities for double-digit revenue growth. On the digital health front, FemTech companies currently receive 3 percent of all digital health funding . In our scan of hundreds of FemTech companies, we found concentration in maternal health patient support, consumer menstrual products, gynecological devices, and solutions in fertility. Funding reached $2.5 billion by early December 2021. In some cases, FemTech companies are filling gaps not yet addressed by biopharma and device incumbents, such as in the area of maternal health. Yet this is clearly, and promisingly, only the beginning of what FemTech can address. There are still significant white spaces (Exhibit 2).

On the cusp of disruption

FemTech companies could disrupt healthcare in a number of ways. Initial breakthroughs are already being achieved across a range of areas, including the following:

• Improving care delivery: Virtual clinics such as Tia, innovative brick-and-mortar clinics such as Kindbody, and direct-to-consumer prescription delivery services like those of The Pill Club, all enable women to access care in a more convenient, consumer-centric manner.
• Enabling self-care: Trackers and wearables offered by companies such as Bloomlife, and at-home diagnostics like those provided by Modern Fertility, are among the FemTech solutions that are helping women take greater charge of their health and health-related data.
• Improving diagnoses: Clinical diagnostics companies are pushing the scientific frontier to address unmet medical needs in areas such as endometriosis (DotLab) and preterm birth (Sera Prognostics).
• Addressing stigmatized areas: Companies are addressing what had been considered to be stigmatized topics head on, such as menstrual health (Thinx), sexual health (Rosy Wellness), pelvic care (Elvie), and menopause (Elektra Health).
• Delivering culturally sensitive and tailored care: Solutions tailored for subpopulations are emerging for Black women (such as Health in Her HUE), LGBTQ+ populations (FOLX Health), and women in low- and middle-income countries (Kasha).

The categories in which FemTech is having an impact are increasing—and also, in some cases, starting to evolve, overlap, and redefine themselves as FemTech companies begin to scale up and seek new ways to expand. For instance, Maven started in maternity care and then expanded across the reproductive life cycle. Peppy, which was founded to offer a solution for organizations to better support their people once they had brought their new babies home, now also addresses challenges around menopause. Other businesses, among them models that were launched on a direct-to-consumer model , are now seeking to obtain regulatory approval and reimbursement, as they build upon their experiences and real-world data to provide improved solutions for a broader set of stakeholders who benefit from better women’s healthcare.

Looking forward, early movers can stake out opportunities in prominent white spaces, including by leveraging technology to address women’s health issues beyond reproduction, and by helping to meet the needs of underserved populations such as low-income or minority communities. FemTech also presents significant partnership opportunities for legacy players in traditional sectors. Cosmetics leader L’Oréal, for example, recently unveiled a partnership with the period-tracking app Clue to deepen knowledge on the relationship between skin health and the menstrual cycle. As FemTech companies increasingly gain traction and change the competitive landscape, stakeholders within and beyond the healthcare ecosystem could well provide additional momentum.

Moreover, FemTech—and indeed, improved women’s healthcare overall—could help catalyze positive social changes across the healthcare ecosystem and beyond. Consider menopause, which frequently occurs when women are most likely to step into senior roles . Its effects can have an impact on the number of women in top positions and the quality of women’s experiences throughout organizations. 2 Jeneva Patterson, “It’s time to start talking about menopause at work,” Harvard Business Review , February 24, 2020. Deploying technological and consumer-centric solutions to address menopause can serve as a model and an enabler for future female leaders.

Along those lines, FemTech is powered to a significant extent by female entrepreneurs—more than 70 percent of FemTech companies we analyzed had at least one female founder, compared with a 20 percent norm for new companies. Indeed, across the value chain, a more inclusive, gender-aware healthcare system could help support more women to become inventors, investors, physicians, founders—and healthier human beings, solving for the health conditions of other human beings. Research has shown that when inventors set out to solve a health problem, male inventors are more likely to solve for a male-oriented condition; women-led teams solve for both. 3 John-Paul Ferguson, Rembrand Koning, and Sampsa Samila, “Who do we invent for? Patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent,” Science , June 18, 2021, Volume 372, Number 6548, pp. 1345–48.

Increasing female representation among researchers, inventors, investors, and founders can create more consumer-centric products and solutions that recognize and target women’s specific healthcare needs. Indeed, the market is not just women consumers but also payers and providers that seek better products and tools to engage more effectively with women end consumers. FemTech solutions are not only achieving commercial success; they are contributing to the conditions for continued innovation. Because women are not just consumers but the primary healthcare decision-makers for themselves and often for their families, better health outcomes for women can lead to better outcomes for society.

As women’s healthcare becomes an increasing priority, FemTech is rising to meet the challenge as it matches capital and talent with unmet needs. In a short period of time, FemTech has already demonstrated impressive early wins. An even greater disruption could be ahead.

Emma Kemble is a consultant in McKinsey’s New Jersey office, Lucy Pérez is a senior partner in the Boston office, Valentina Sartori  is a partner in the Zurich office, Gila Tolub is a partner in the Tel Aviv office, and Alice Zheng is an alumna of the Silicon Valley office.

The authors wish to thank Angie Cui, Arshiya Fazal, Kat Guillen, Prithvi Kamadana, Peter Pfeiffer, Nikhil Sahni, Josh Sternberg, Nicole Szlezak, and Eli Weinberg for their contributions to this article.

References to companies presented as examples in this article do not represent an endorsement from McKinsey & Company.

This article was edited by David Schwartz, an executive editor in the Tel Aviv office.

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