Where do people get this idea that 10% of the worlds population is gay?

I assume they use the census, I wasn't in the last UK one as I've only just come of age.
Although in general if you survey something like 100,000 RANDOM people the percentage of homosexual people in the world would be similar to that. You just extrapolate

You don't need to ask every person on the planet, it's just probability. If you roll a dice 600 times you would get around 100 6s. You know that the chance of a six is 1 in 6, so you can guess that if you rolled the dice 6,000,000 times you'd get around 1,000,000 6s. It's the same for sexuality, except the percentage is around 10%... i'm not sure exactly.

A better example, if you choose 1000 random people from the Earth and had a way to find out truthfully what their sexuality was (they can lie normally) and 100 people were gay... you could extrapolate that to say that 10% of any number of random people are gay, including the entire world's population.

It is assumed that every person on this Earth's 'ability' to be homosexual is the same, regardless of whether they admit it. This may not actually be the case as we dont definitively know what causes homosexuality

---------- Post added 8th Jun 2014 at 05:48 PM ----------

I must emphasize that this is extremely important, the statistic relies completely on the assumption that every type of person can be gay as often as any other. If for example Chinese people were somehow 'immune' to being gay then it wouldn't work

 

Yeah I think its probably higher also.

More about how they gather information for anyone that might be interested:

What Percentage of the Population Is Gay?

 

Yeah when I heard that it was 10% I automatically assumed it was higher than that since it's still not safe to be out in a lot of places

 

I don't think that link actually says about how they gather the info? Other than the obvious 'we survey people'

---------- Post added 8th Jun 2014 at 08:29 PM ----------

If they were able to survey enough people to make it accurate for extrapolation to the entire world's population (idk, maybe 100,000 people or something?) with each of these people being genuinely honest (could use a lie detector or something perhaps) about their sexuality then it wouldn't matter about the people who are not in the survey (people living in places where it's not safe to be out), it would still be accurate.
Most of this research is done in the US

 

I think that 10% is the most liberal high-end estimate.

 

To be honest, I think It's closer to around 40% in my experience for all LGBT persons....only because 1) many people are closeted and 2) There's proof that even most people identifying as 'heterosexual' have bisexual tendancies they choose not to admit to. True heterosexuality is mucher rarer than society would have you believe, and definitely not 90% of our population.

 

I always wondered this and they would back it up with like they had evidence and say a scientist said so there was a survey so it's right . Now we all know that there are closeted gay people around so how are people so sure .

 

It seems to be more than 10% where I live, but way less in less urban areas. Where I used to work, every fourth person to come in was a lesbian. And about 10% of the rest were gay men (who usually shared my name). I think people flock to where they are accepted, so it fluctuates from place to place. When I go to Austin, nearly everyone is queer or a hipster.