Online Program

Demographic Inclusivity Illuminates Unique Food Insecurity Issues for Non-binary Students (309553)

Keywords: Inclusivity, food insecurity, gender, demographics

Recent studies have shown college students at 2-year and 4-year public institutions can range from 20% to over 50%. Students at a private 4-year college in Minnesota created a survey to understand the prevalence and type of food insecurity on their campus in 2017. In addition to measuring demographics related to race, disability, and socioeconomic status, these students measured gender inclusively: agender, genderqueer, transgender, and a write-in category were offered as choices, along with cis-male and cis-female. In their survey, 3.9% of students were neither cis-male nor cis-female in 2017, 3.0% in 2018, and 2.5% in 2019, which aligned with the a statewide survey of high school students in 2016 which found 2.7% of high school students in the state identified as non-binary. For these non-binary/trans students, the odds of food insecurity as defined by the FDA were 3.3 times the rates for cis students (p=0.090). For student food insecurity as defined by the Wisconsin Hope Lab, non-binary/trans students had 7.0 times the odds of food insecurity that cis students had (p=0.0177), holding housing insecurity, race, disability status, and socioeconomic status constant for all three ratios. Two years later, after working with food services to provide more accessible food choices and creating a mobile food bank on campus, the disparity between non-binary/trans and cis students was no longer significant for any type of food insecurity. The odds of FDA food insecurity for non-binary/trans students dropped to 2.9 times the odds for cis students, and student food insecurity for non-binary/trans students dropped to 5.1 times the odds for cis students.