BOmens have fewer orgasms than men. No joke. I can already imagine the sarcastic comments that are piling up: “That’s nothing new!” What Perhaps a new development is the fact that women continue have fewer orgasms over the course of their lives than men, even though we would expect them to have more experience, confidence, and an understanding (on both sides) of what they enjoy in bed.

A new study published in the journal Sexual Medicine has found that not only do men have higher rates of orgasm during sex than women, but these rates also correspond with age. Researchers surveyed 24,000 single Americans between the ages of 18 and 100. Men’s orgasm rates ranged from 70% to 85%, while women’s ranged from 46% to 58%. Any hope that we could reach parity with age was quickly dashed. Women’s orgasm rates remained 22 to 30 percentage points lower than men’s across all age groups.

That actually seems surprising. Like you, I was relatively unimpressed by the “discovery” that men have more orgasms, and my reaction was more of a shrug emoji than genuine anger. It’s not long since the last major study on the orgasm discrepancy, and sexual culture isn’t changing that quickly. That the orgasm gap remains wide open is unfortunate, but not really surprising. Like the researchers, I would have expected older women (at 40, I’d be classified as an “early middle adult,” according to the study) to be more knowledgeable about what they want, more confident about asking for it—and, perhaps more crucially, less willing to put up with partners who don’t deliver. But that’s not what they were asked. They were asked how often they orgasmed “during intercourse.”

This wording changes everything. Research shows that for the vast majority of heterosexuals, the word “sex” means penetration, even more so when associated with “intercourse.” They usually talk about penis-in-vagina, although many also consider anal sex. Whichever way you look at it, there remains a glaring problem: women have significantly less chance of having an orgasm this way.

This shouldn’t be news, either. Authors, therapists, researchers, and educators have been talking for years about the need to expand our definition of sex to account for the fact that most women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm. In fact, as a sex and culture reporter for nearly a decade, I’ve lost track of the articles, podcasts, roundtables, and social media posts I’ve seen commenting on this very topic.

When it comes to heterosexual sex, the things that happen with lips, hands, tongues, fingers and toys are far too often grouped together as “foreplay” – they are not considered “real sex”. Yet for women, they are the activities most likely to lead to orgasm. “We need to stop using the word ‘sex’ for intercourse because it creates the false impression that intercourse is the main event for both “Men and women and… that’s not it,” wrote American psychologist Laurie Mintz in her 2017 book “Becoming Cliterate.” Indeed.

Considering sex with penetration as the main event is especially absurd in the context of queer relationships. That’s probably why the 13% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals who participated in the study were able to extrapolate the term “intercourse” to their own experiences. Not surprisingly, women who have sex with women consistently report higher rates of orgasm during sex than women who have sex with men. This was observed by sexologist Alfred Kinsey in 1953, reinforced by Masters and Johnson in the ’60s, and has reliably shown up in every orgasm gap study since, including the recent one conducted by Match in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute. “Lesbian (and, the author might add, bisexual) women are more likely to give and receive oral sex, with encounters often lasting longer than those of heterosexual women,” the study’s authors note. You certainly won’t catch me downplaying the importance of enthusiastic oral sex, but couldn’t part of it be because queer women include oral sex in their definition of sex anyway?

Asking women about their orgasm rate during “intercourse” is the academic equivalent of asking “Did you come?” without having done anything to facilitate or hasten that outcome. And simply repeating this study every few years, as if our anatomy evolved in the time it took to film a new season of Euphoria, will do nothing to close the orgasm gap. The only way to do that is to have serious conversations about and prioritize other types of sex.

• Franki Cookney is a freelance journalist specialising in sex, gender politics and social development, and hosts the sex podcast The Second Circle.