Who are the IEET’s audience?

Jul 16, 2013

Responses to the IEET survey keep coming in, and we’re over 450 as of today. But so far we have a pretty good snapshot of the IEET’s fans and supporters.

Most (79%) of you are male, but that is actually progress in gender balance since the surveys that I conducted of the transhumanist milieu in the 2000s which found closer to 90% males. About one in seven (15%) identify as something other than straight, which is far higher than in the population in general. As to ethnic ancestry most (89%) identify as white/European, but as we know from the geographic representation of folks who have created accounts on the IEET website, we have fans throughout the world representing many different ethnicities. (I’m not sure how seriously to take the 5% who said they were descended from the native peoples of the Americas; if we have that many fans among the first peoples I’m thrilled, but I suspect a lot of you descendants of European immigrants were staking your right to be native to the Western hemisphere.)





In age, the modal group (34%) is in the 40-59 bracket, with a third younger and a third older. More than half of you have a graduate degree, and four fifths (82%) have a college degree. In occupations you represent a similarly wide diversity. A quarter (25%) of you are students, scholars and academics, but there are self-employed and folks in the creative arts (20%), private sector white collar (16%), public sector (8%), nonprofit, political and union employees (6%) , healthcare workers (3%) and blue collar workers (1%). More than a tenth (12%) are retired, and a few of you (1%) are homemakers and even active military (eight of the respondents).







As to your political and religious identities you lean to the Left and secular side of things. Three fourths (74%) identify with some kind of liberal, progressive, or left-wing identity. More than two thirds (69%) of you support transhumanism although only 20% belong to Humanity+. About half (47%) identify as “technoprogressive.” So about six in ten (59%) are either left-leaning transhumanists or “technoprogressives.” Digging into your politics a little further about twice as many (55%) identify with soft Left labels like “liberal,” “democratic socialist” or “progressive” than with hard Left labels (24%) like “revolutionary socialist” or “anarchist.”

New Left identities (48%) like feminist, anti-racist and Green are spread across both groups. Some of you (13%) identify with “libertarian” and “minarchist,” which as the comments have already noted do not necessarily connote the same things in the US as they do outside the US. As befitting a futurist-minded audience about 18% of you are advocates of a future political system and fully 28% of you were neutral or disagreed that multiparty democracy with civil liberties was the best political system (we’d love to hear more of those futurist political ideas!)





Just shy of half (49%) of you are agnostic or atheist, and 17% identified as “spiritual not religious.” This makes our audience less secular than the two thirds non-spiritual majority that I found among transhumanists in the 2000s. On the other hand, only about 24% of you belong to a church or other religious institution. Among the religious identities we have a whopping 11% Buddhists in the audience (45 of the respondents), about 13% are Protestant, Catholic or LDS Christians, and 4% are Jewish. About 6% are pagans and pantheists, and 2% are Hindu or Muslim. Then there are the Unitarian Universalists (5%) and others (15%).

Thanks again for responding! I’ll keep crunching the numbers and reporting on your opinions of the issues and priorities we asked about.