SUMMARY: A Williams Institute researcher claims half of U.S. servicewomen may be lesbians, and that that's why "don't ask" victims are disproportionately female.

Lesbians could very well outnumber gay men in the military, according to Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

"The percentage of lesbians that serve in the military is really quite high," Gates said. "It's possible that there are more lesbians than gay men serving in the military."

Gates' interpretation could explain why such a disproportionate percentage of servicewomen relative to men are discharged under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Even though women account for only about 15 percent of the Army and Air Force, new numbers released this week show that they make up nearly half of all "don't ask" discharges.

The new data, gathered under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group for military personnel, was published Monday in the New York Times. The figures show an increase in the percentage of women discharged under "don't ask, don't tell" between 2006 and 2007.

Women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, but 46 percent of "don't ask" discharges last year were women, the Times reported. While 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women.

In 2006, about 35 percent of the Army's "don't ask" discharges and 36 percent of the Air Force's were women, the Times said.

Neither the Times nor SLDN offered a reason for the gender discrepancy.

"It's not that (the Times) made factual errors," Gates says, but that without an interpretation, the information suggests that a disproportionate number of women were discharged from the military under "don't ask, don't tell" in 2007 for no apparent reason. "Why might that be? That's the question (the Times) didn't answer for me," Gates said.

Gates says the issue isn't what percentage of women is in the military, it's the "percentage of women among gay and lesbian populations in the military."

Gates and the Williams Institute, using statistical techniques and census data, found that lesbians could account for anywhere from 40 percent to more than half of the total female service members.