LGBT Life in the EU

In 2012, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) conducted a survey among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people living in the 28 European Union (EU) countries (including Croatia). The aim of the survey was to obtain robust and comparable data that would allow a better understanding of LGBT people experience the enjoyment of fundamental rights. Around 93,000 people have participated.

 While there is an official report of survey analysis I decided to look at the results from a somewhat different angle. My main purpose was to find out which EU countries are the best/worst for LGBT people to live in. You can find my full analysis on Kaggle.

There were 5 question blocks (QB) with specific questions:

• • Daily Life
  • Discrimination
  • Violence and Harassment
  • Rights Awareness
  • Transgender Specific Questions (which I didn’t include in my analysis)

Survey responses for measures in each of the 5 QB can be explored using the dashboard below.

For my best/worst LGBT country analysis, I assigned the Rank for each of the first four QB and then took an average of them to get the Final Rank which allows us to see the countries with the highest ratio of “positive” answers. The lower the rank - the “better” is the country for LGBT community. Results look as follows:

And the absolute winners are Finland🇫🇮, Denmark🇩🇰, Sweden🇸🇪, Netherlands🇳🇱 while the absolute losers are Lithuania🇱🇹, Romania🇷🇴, Cyprus🇨🇾. (Still planning to go to Cyprus for your vacation, aren’t you?)

If we take a look at happiness ratio we can see that Sweden and Finland have the highest ratio of positive response on a question “How satisfied would you say you are with your life these days?” (the higher the score, the darker the area, the higher is the ratio).

Then I looked at the ratio of “open” people by the country. I was not surprised by the results: the lower is the Total Rank (calculated before), the higher is the ratio of open LGBT people (negative correlation). In other words, if the country provides a more suitable life for the LGBT community then a larger amount of people are not afraid to be open.

All of these considered, I can say that there is still a long way for serene life for LGBT community in EU. There are still countries where people are being harassed or discriminated by their orientation. In a lot of countries more than 80% of LGBT people live “in a closet”. However, there are countries that others could take an example from. While waiting for another EU survey to find out if the situation has gone any better since 2012 (which I believe is true) let’s just try to live in peace and accept choices of other people ✌🏻🏳️‍🌈.

Cover photo: Shutterstock