Acceptance of LGBTQ people in all spheres of society – work, family, and community – has grown at a remarkable pace in the United States. A recent Pew Research Foundation study reported that 92% of all LGBTQ adults felt that society is more accepting of them than a decade ago, and 87% of adults report personally knowing someone who is gay or lesbian (up from 61% in 1993). Same-sex couples throughout the country can now get legally married after the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. LGBTQ people are highly visible in the media, on television, in the movies, and in the C-suites of major companies like Apple, Google, and IBM. For LGBTQ people, it has certainly seemed as if, in the language of columnist Dan Savage’s 2010 campaign to combat the epidemic of LGBT youth suicide, “It Gets Better.”
Gay Men Used to Earn Less than Straight Men; Now They Earn More
Researchers aren’t sure why. But the possibilities are fascinating.
December 04, 2017
Summary.
For 20 years, nearly all the studies on gay men in the workplace have found an identical result: comparing the earnings of two men with similar education profiles, years of experience, skills, and job responsibilities, gay men consistently earns less than straight men (between 5% and 10% less). The stability of this finding has been remarkable: it has been replicated across numerous datasets in several different countries. Until now. In a recent paper, researchers from Vanderbilt analyzed data from a major federal survey in the United States that had not previously been used in this literature – presumably because it only recently began to ask about sexual orientation – and found that the gay male earnings penalty had disappeared.