One is that while “It Gets Better” seems reasonable for explaining the gradual disappearance of an earnings penalty, it does not seem well suited for explaining the emergence of an earnings premium (did it really get that much better?). The patterns from these experiments certainly were consistent with the idea that better attitudes toward LGBTQ individuals could translate into better workplace outcomes for that group.Īnd yet there are also patterns that make the Dan Savage explanation difficult to square. The null findings of these recent resume studies contrast sharply with an earlier 2005 controlled resume study that also used the LGBT-student group approach and found substantial differences in the likelihood of getting a callback for an interview in favor of the straight candidate, a difference about as large as the black/white callback difference in the well-known Bertrand and Mullainathan “Emily and Greg/Lakisha and Jamal” resume study. Moreover, a few patterns in the literature support this possibility, including the fact that two recent well-controlled field experiments failed to find meaningful differences in employment outcomes for fake candidates whose profiles were manipulated to be either gay or straight (one fielded in 2013 where the candidate’s profile on a social network site was listed as either “interested in” men or women, and the other fielded in 2010 where the candidate’s resume listed a leadership position in an LGBT-related student group or a non-LGBT-related student group). If that’s the case, then, naturally, improved attitudes toward LGBTQ people would reduce this penalty. The simplest explanation that came to mind first was the Dan Savage explanation: “It Gets Better.” One interpretation of the literature’s near-universal prior finding of a gay male earnings penalty was that it was a consequence of labor market discrimination against gay men. Once we had accepted that the finding was not going anywhere – that it was “real” – we set about trying to understand and explain it.
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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.
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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.”
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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).
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Acceptance of LGBTQ people in all spheres of society – work, family, and community – has grown at a remarkable pace in the United States.