Why are gay people rich

The hierarchy sort of goes heterosexual couples, lesbian couples, followed by gay male couples. Okay, here are the numbers. In the U. Among lesbian households, that number is 22 percent. And only 10 percent of gay male couples are raising a child. So a straight couple is more than four times as likely as a gay male couple to be raising a kid. And what kind of expenditures are we talking about for having children?

58% Of Gay People Worry About This One Thing. Do You?

So a couple without kids — gay or otherwise — has that money to spend in some other way. How is it spent? Well, here is some data. One reason is that they can afford to! So when economists talk about location they use the word amenities to mean the kinds of things that people are willing to pay for. So access to theater, or to nature, or to a good bar scene or things like that. So all the evidence seems to confirm the hunch that Danny Rosa, our Freakonomics Radio listener, got in touch to ask us about.

BUT, as you know, this show is all about using data to look at the world.

Are Gay Men Really Rich? (Ep. ): Full Transcript - Freakonomics Freakonomics

And some data is much better than others. The most important thing to know is that it is actually pretty hard to get good data on lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, why everything that we just told you is probably kind of wrong. Keith Ericson is a professor of public policy and law at Boston University. But even before that, you have to back up a step:. What people have been able to do at the census is look at people who report being in a same-sex-partnered household. So you see the problem, yes? You probably also see why, in the earlier part of our program, we told you about the income of gay couples but not individuals.

And why is that? Well, maybe a high-earning gay couple is more likely to divulge their sexuality to a census-taker than a low-earning couple. So in a way, the more we learn here, the less we seem to know. Maybe we should go back even further back, to something really basic — like: A Gallup poll tells us the number is about 3. So how can we find out if the affluent-gay stereotype is really true? Badgett is one of their scholars. Gay and lesbian people tend to have higher-than-average education levels, so you would expect them to have higher-than-average incomes.

But when you compare gay and straight people with the same education level, actually the gay people earn less. Did you hear that?

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Badgett says that, while her data may not be so great either, it appears that if you took two observationally equivalent men — same background, same education, and so on — that the gay man would earn less than the straight man, not more. In fact, earlier this year, Badgett and two co-authors released a Williams Institute study which found that gays and lesbians are more likely to live in poverty than observationally equivalent heterosexuals.

Dan Black, from the University of Chicago, has a couple ideas:.

I think there is some good evidence that gay men do take occupations that are, you know, they look more female like, and of course female occupations traditionally pay a little bit lower so that could explain a part of it. Now, again, keep in mind, an analysis like this relies on self-identified gay men who live with a same-sex partner — but, among that group, a gay man was about 16 times more likely than a straight man to teach preschool or kindergarten. About 5 times more likely to be a librarian or a registered nurse. Not the highest-paying jobs.

Dan Black says that if gay men do indeed earn less, there may be another reason:. Now, how does an employer discriminate against someone they think is gay? Here, according to Black and Badgett, is one way it can happen:. And you know, down halfway through the resume you list a membership, or not, in a gay or lesbian group.

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BADGETT And it employers, you know, who are seeing resumes with and without that line tend to notice it apparently, because in one study that was done by a sociologist recently here in the U. But gay men had to apply for eleven jobs to even get just one interview.

And I suspect that that differential treatment between the gay and the straight applicants is likely to be seen in other ways, if we could actually study this further into the employment process. So how much might discrimination affect what gay men earn? You remember Keith Ericson, from Boston University? A study that Ericson co-authored found that when people could answer questions totally anonymously, they were much more likely to express anti-gay feelings.

Now, this will likely change as society moves on. Same-sex marriage is increasingly being recognized and legalized in this country and elsewhere. In contrast to the earlier data, however, it turns out that gay men now earn more than straight men.

That said, when accounting for differences in employment status lesbians were more likely to have full-time work than straight women, while gay men were less likely to have full-time work than straight men and other differences between groups, the overall earnings premium for both lesbians and gay men translated to roughly 9 to 10 percent. The question then becomes why: Why are both gay men and lesbians out-earning their heterosexual counterparts?

There are several potential explanations. One possibility is that it's a function of increased LGBT acceptance and less anti-gay discrimination. However, while that could explain why the wage gap between gay and straight men has closed, it's not clear why it would translate to an earnings premium for gay men. Plus, these data simultaneously show that gay men are less likely to be employed than straight men.

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As the authors of this study point out, "to the extent that the lower employment partly reflects discrimination against gay men, it is hard to imagine earnings improving substantially but not employment. Another issue with this explanation is that the lesbian data were right in line with earlier studies—so why would increasing LGBT acceptance only influence gay men's earnings while having no effect on lesbians?

An alternative possibility is that maybe there's a selection effect in terms of who is coming out today. For example, maybe being out about one's sexuality is disproportionately likely among sexual minorities who are more highly educated and have other characteristics that increase their odds of higher earnings. This explanation gains appeal when you compare the demographics of gay and heterosexual men in this sample: Gay men were more likely to hold a college degree and less likely to be high school educated, a higher percentage were white, and far fewer were married with children.

In addition, gay men were more likely to live in the Western US, while being less likely to live in the Midwest. Lesbian and heterosexual women also differed, but in fewer ways: Lesbians were more likely to be college educated and less likely to have children. It's important to note that the gay and lesbian earnings premium was still observed even when the researchers statistically controlled for these differences; however, the fact that gay and straight folks differed in so many ways suggests that there could be other, unaccounted for differences between these groups that could potentially explain the wage differences.

We need more research to replicate these findings and also to determine which, if any, of the above explanations for them are correct. However, the take-home from all of this should not be that gays and lesbians are being paid more because of their sexual orientation. There's no evidence that this is the case, especially when there are so many other plausible explanations, like self-selection.

It would also be wise to avoid concluding that discrimination against gays and lesbians in the United States has disappeared and is no longer a problem. To the contrary, anti-gay discrimination is very much alive and well and at least partially evidenced by the fact that gay men have lower levels of employment.

Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich
Why are gay people rich