New research confirms the “sexuality pay gap” is real
The gender pay gap and the racial pay gap have been well documented, but there’s another inequality in the labor market often overlooked: the sexuality pay gap.
In a seminal study published in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review in 1995, M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, found that gay and bisexual male employees in the US earned between 11% and 27% less than heterosexual male workers, even after controlling for experience, education, occupation, , Badgett carried out a review of a number of studies on sexual orientation discrimination from the 1990s and early 2000s, and found similar results: gay men earned 10% to 32% less than similarly situated heterosexual men.
Over time, pay discrimination has persisted, but the pay differential appears to be , Marieka Klawitter, professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington, undertook a meta-analysis of 31 studies published between 1995 and 2012, from the US and other developed countries. She found that on average, gay men earned 11% less than heterosexual men. (But estimates still varied greatly between those studies, ranging from no difference in pay in some circumstances to a gap of over 30% in others.)