We subjected the gay male earnings premium to a host of extra tests to see if we could make the result go away. We double- and triple-checked the dataset for other patterns that would indicate some fundamental error or data problem.
We went back through the published literature to see if we were making new or strange measurement or specification choices. And not only had it disappeared, it had turned into a 10% premium, meaning that gay men in recent years earned substantially more than straight men with similar education, experience, and job profiles. In a recent paper, a PhD student and I 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. The stability of this finding has been remarkable: it has been replicated across numerous datasets in several different countries (e.g., Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and time periods. A natural question, then, is: have the shifts in approval of LGBTQ individuals corresponded to equivalent improvements in their paychecks?Įconomists and management scholars have been crunching the numbers on this question for over 20 years, and until very recently, nearly all the studies have found an identical result: if you compare 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). There is, for example, no federal nondiscrimination protection on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Whether these massive changes have translated into improvements in workplace outcomes for the average gay man or lesbian, however, is not so obvious. 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.” 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. Same-sex couples throughout the country can now get legally married after the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. 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).
Acceptance of LGBTQ people in all spheres of society – work, family, and community – has grown at a remarkable pace in the United States.