Originally appeared August 22, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.
THE CLAIM is often made that gays and lesbians suffer employment discrimination. One way to demonstrate this beyond anecdotal reports might be to show that gays and lesbians have lower income levels than similarly situated heterosexuals.
Yet we also like to claim that gays and lesbians represent an economically upscale market with ample disposable income to buy a range of recreational and leisure products, arguing that companies should compete for our business and advertise in our publications.
While these claims are not exactly contradictory, they certainly point in opposite direction and raise a host of questions about discrimination in employment and family benefits, gay people's incomes, gay and lesbian consumer behavior and the nature and extent of the "gay market."
Answering some of these questions is the aim of a new book "Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay men" (University of Chicago Press, 2001), by University of Massachusetts economics professor Lee Badgett..
Badgett's book seems to be the first serious book on the subject. But what makes it particularly valuable is a quality that often irritates the general reader. For instance, in Chapter 2, "The Economic Penalty for Being Gay," she concludes:
"Lesbian/bisexual women earn 11 percent more than heterosexual women. The difference is not statistically significant. ... Gay/bisexal men, however, ... earn 17 percent less than heterosexual men with the same education, race, location, and occupation."
That conclusion is interesting and has some value. But whatever its merit, readers will not get to it until they have read 15 pages that discuss methodology, explain the limitation of the available data, offer alternative interpretations of the evidence, and so forth.
Badgett's aim is to give readers not just a number but a sense of why some of the statistics we read and swallow whole are open to serious doubt, often the result of a series of questionable extrapolations, interpretations, even arbitrary definitions valid in some contexts but not others.
For instance, Badgett notes that other studies using some of the same data--including the biennial General Social Survey (GSS)--but using different categories for sexual orientation confirm lower earning for gay men but find statistically significant higher income for lesbian/bisexual women.
Why lesbians might earn more than heterosexual women is not clear. Badgett wonders if lesbians have more job experience or more commitment to the labor force. That gay men earn less than heterosexual males she takes as evidence of discrimination, a view worth examining another time.
One of Badgett's other interesting discussions is about the gay/lesbian market. Badgett is eager to dispute market research data showing that gays and lesbians have high household incomes and so represent an ideal consumer market.
For instance, a 1988 Simmons Marketing Research survey found that gay newspaper readers have household incomes more than 50 percent higher than heterosexual couples. But Badgett wonders if the figures are correct and suggests even if they are they may not be generalizable to all gays.
People responding to a mail-in survey, she speculates, may be more interested in surveys because of a higher level of education. That would make respondents a relatively high-income group compared with other readers of the same newspaper.
But, she agrees, "It is well known that ... readers of magazines and newspapers tend to be better educated and have higher incomes." So even if reader demographics are slightly skewed, they can indicate "some affluent lesbians and gay men who constitute an attractive potential market."
Then too, if gays and lesbians have fewer children, they would have more disposable income even if their gross incomes were no higher than heterosexuals'. The number of lesbians rearing children seems uncertain, but gay men clearly have far fewer children than heterosexual men.
"Gay male couples are much more likely to match the DINK ["double income, no kids"] model, with two incomes and fewer dependents," Badgett says. "If marketers are searching for consumers with high incomes who might have a high demand for upscale products, their most promising targets would be gay men."
In his 1996 study "American Gay" sociologist Stephen Murray cites several small surveys suggesting that a little less than 50 percent of gay men are partnered. But single gay men would be childless too and so might also have higher than average disposable income.
Badgett's book, of course is not the final word on any of these topics. Nor could it be: The information we have is far too sketchy. Many gays and lesbians are still in the closet and we have little way of learning about them.
Then too, the world is steadily changing--in levels of prejudice, in the number of people out of the closet, in the average age of the open gay population, in the structure of gay people's economic priorities. Data from just a decade ago already feels irrelevant.
And as more employers offer partnership (family) benefits and governments offer partnership registration, gays may (or may not) feel more incentives to become partnered, affecting their economic position, their residential preferences and their consumer behavior.