If the UK education system produces around 10,000 doctoral candidates per year, and they live for, on average, fifty years after finishing their thesis, then they form slightly less than 1% of the population. So it seems reasonable to assume that "Dr" correctly describes somewhere between 0.5% and 2% of people.
Plausible research suggests that people who publically identify as non-binary are around 0.5% of the population. That's less than the number with doctorates, but not incomparably so. While I'm sure not every non-binary person will select "Mx" from the proposed list, I know a number of definitely binary people (most of them women) who do use it for preference, to avoid giving information about their gender. So 0.5% doesn't seem an unreasonable guess for that one.
It seems unlikely that priests are 0.5% of the UK population - according to the last census, less than 10% of the population attends church regularly, so that would be one priest for every 20 parishoners. A useful BBC article gives the 2013 numbers as 113 new Anglican priests and 63 RC ones. If we double to allow for other denominations, and ignore the fact that both the CoE and the RCC are having more recruitment success now than they have for a couple of decades, using the 50-year timespan I applied to Drs gives us around 18,000 people using "Rev", "Father", or similar. That's less than 0.03%.
So even if only one non-binary person in ten uses "Mx" (and no-one else uses it at all), they still outnumber the priests. So I stand by my thoughts on frequency, and the list being founded on that.
I suspect BA's long list is a hang-over from the early days of air travel, when "Colonel X" and "Lord Y" made up a rather more significant proportion of their passengers (and were likely to complain bitterly about being addressed as "Mr" like a mere plebian). Because why would you want to update a 1920s list when setting it up for use in a 21st century database?
I think the "Ms"/"Miss"/"Mrs" thing is heavily mired in cultural issues, both between nations and between generations (and then there's social status...). But if you did a large scale poll of preferred title, I'd be surprised if any of those three came in much below 10% of the answers, putting each one far ahead of "Dr" or "Mx".
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-25 09:06 pm (UTC)Plausible research suggests that people who publically identify as non-binary are around 0.5% of the population. That's less than the number with doctorates, but not incomparably so. While I'm sure not every non-binary person will select "Mx" from the proposed list, I know a number of definitely binary people (most of them women) who do use it for preference, to avoid giving information about their gender. So 0.5% doesn't seem an unreasonable guess for that one.
It seems unlikely that priests are 0.5% of the UK population - according to the last census, less than 10% of the population attends church regularly, so that would be one priest for every 20 parishoners. A useful BBC article gives the 2013 numbers as 113 new Anglican priests and 63 RC ones. If we double to allow for other denominations, and ignore the fact that both the CoE and the RCC are having more recruitment success now than they have for a couple of decades, using the 50-year timespan I applied to Drs gives us around 18,000 people using "Rev", "Father", or similar. That's less than 0.03%.
So even if only one non-binary person in ten uses "Mx" (and no-one else uses it at all), they still outnumber the priests. So I stand by my thoughts on frequency, and the list being founded on that.
I suspect BA's long list is a hang-over from the early days of air travel, when "Colonel X" and "Lord Y" made up a rather more significant proportion of their passengers (and were likely to complain bitterly about being addressed as "Mr" like a mere plebian). Because why would you want to update a 1920s list when setting it up for use in a 21st century database?
I think the "Ms"/"Miss"/"Mrs" thing is heavily mired in cultural issues, both between nations and between generations (and then there's social status...). But if you did a large scale poll of preferred title, I'd be surprised if any of those three came in much below 10% of the answers, putting each one far ahead of "Dr" or "Mx".