Shere Hite

Shere Hite (St. Joseph, Missouri, 1942 – London, 2020) was an American-born writer and sex researcher best known for her studies of female sexuality. Born Shirley Diana Gregory, she took the surname of her stepfather, Raymond Hite. Her work emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970s and built on the research of Alfred Kinsey and of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose assumptions about sexual behaviour she considered culturally shaped and insufficiently questioned.

She earned a master's degree in history at the University of Florida in 1967 and moved to New York to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University, which she never completed; she later attributed this to the institution's conservative climate at the time. She went on to earn further doctorates, one at Nihon University in Tokyo and another in clinical sexology at Maimonides University in Florida, where she also taught. Rather than relying on representative statistical samples, she worked with thousands of anonymous questionnaire responses to explore how people understand their sexual experience.

Her best-known book, The Hite Report on female sexuality (1976), became a bestseller. It argued that most women did not reach orgasm through intercourse alone but readily did so through direct clitoral stimulation. The findings, and the method behind them, drew sharp methodological criticism: self-selected respondents are hard to generalise from, and the sociologist Philip Zimbardo questioned how far her results could be trusted. Her supporters countered that her approach reached experiences that laboratory studies and clinical samples missed.

The controversy grew intense through the 1980s and 1990s. After years of hostile media coverage, she left the United States and in 1995 renounced her American citizenship to become German, having come to regard German society as more open to her work. She later lived between Germany, France and the United Kingdom and died in London in 2020.

Her legacy is twofold: she is cited in debates about survey design, and she is valued for placing subjective experience at the centre of sex research. Her studies remain a standard example in university courses on sampling methods, where they are used to examine the limits of volunteer-based data.