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Public attitudes and policies toward LGBTQ individuals have improved substantially in recent decades. Economists are actively shaping the discourse around these policies and contributing to our understanding of the economic lives of LGBTQ individuals. In this paper, we present the most up-to-date estimates of the size, location, demographic characteristics, and family structures of LGBTQ individuals in the United States. We describe an emerging literature on the effects of legal access to same-sex marriage on family and socioeconomic outcomes. We also summarize what is known about the size, direction, and sources of wage differentials related to variation in sexual orientation and gender identity. We conclude by describing a range of open questions in LGBTQ economics.

We evaluate a multifaceted policy intervention attempting to jump-start adolescent women’s empowerment in Uganda by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction, and marriage. We find that four years postintervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are more likely to be self-employed. Teen pregnancy, early entry into marriage/cohabitation, and the share of girls reporting sex against their will fall sharply. The results highlight the potential of a multifaceted program that provides skills transfers as a viable and cost-effective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls over a four-year horizon.

There is scant literature available in South Africa that explores the knowledge, attitudes and perceptions of student nursing trainees and other healthcare workers who deliver sexual health services to sexual and gender minority (SGM) communities with unique health needs. An online, mixed-method, questionnaire-based survey was employed to conveniently sample 39/78 (50%) final-year Bachelor of Nursing students from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal to understand their knowledge, attitudes and perceptions. Descriptive statistics were applied for quantitative results and thematic analysis was used for free-text qualitative data. Results suggested that over 67% of the participants lack the skills and knowledge to obtain a comprehensive history salient to the health needs of SGM populations. Students reported that social upbringing and religious beliefs impact the care they render, with many showing favourable attitudes toward the SGM community. Overall, students reported no content related to SGMs in the current nursing curriculum, however, students were receptive, highlighting the need to be clinically competent to provide relevant healthcare for SGM to meet their sexual health needs. It thus require that students must be trained and have included the SGM content in their curriculum to meet the sexual health needs of SGM population to enable non discriminatory, equitable health provision. being informed and having the necessary skills and knowledge obtained during training in the health institutions of higher learning can address the issues of greatest concern related to the HIV health needs of SGM populations.

Although gender is central to contemporary accounts of educational stratification, sexuality has been largely invisible as a population-level axis of academic inequality. Taking advantage of major recent data expansions, the current study establishes sexuality as a core dimension of educational stratification in the United States. First, I analyze lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults’ college completion rates: overall, by race/ethnicity, and by birth cohort. Then, using new data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009, I analyze LGB students’ performance on a full range of achievement and attainment measures. Across analyses, I reveal two demographic facts. First, women’s rising academic advantages are largely confined to straight women: although lesbian women historically outpaced straight women, in contemporary cohorts, lesbian and bisexual women face significant academic disadvantages. Second, boys’ well-documented underperformance obscures one group with remarkably high levels of school success: gay boys. Given these facts, I propose that marginalization from hegemonic gender norms has important—but asymmetric—impacts on men’s and women’s academic success. To illustrate this point, I apply what I call a “gender predictive” approach, using supervised machine learning methods to uncover patterns of inequality otherwise obscured by the binary sex/gender measures typically available in population research.

We show that the U.S. anti-discriminatory laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation and gender identity (i.e. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities) spur innovation, which ultimately leads to higher firm performance. We use the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index (CEI) of 398 (1592 firm-year observations) U.S. firms between 2011 and 2014, and find a significantly positive relationship between CEI and firm innovation. We also find that an interacting effect of CEI and firm innovation leads to higher firm performance. We use our understanding of Rawls' Theory of Justice and stakeholder theory to show that firms with workplace diversity policies are likely to be more innovative and perform better than those without such policies. Our results are robust to endogeneity, reverse causality and simultaneity issues. Our results will trigger debate in similar markets around the globe on the economic benefits of LGBT workplace diversity policies for firms.

Research summary: Previous studies have mixed findings on the relation between corporate socially responsible policies and firm performance. This paper focuses on a specific type of corporate social responsibility—corporate sexual equality, measuring how a firm treats its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees, consumers, and investors—and examines whether and how it relates to firm performance. Using a longitudinal dataset of public firms in the U.S. during the period of 2002-2006, we demonstrate that firms with a higher degree of corporate sexual equality have higher stock returns and higher market valuation. We also identify one of the mediating channels, the labor market channel, that brings higher productivity to firms that embrace sexual equality. Managerial summary: Corporate sexual equality measures how a company treats its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees, consumers, and investors. It is an important dimension of corporate social responsibility policies and diversity management. Using a longitudinal dataset of public firms in the U.S. during the period of 2002-2006, we demonstrate that firms with a higher degree of corporate sexual equality have higher stock returns, higher market valuation, and higher labor productivity. Our findings suggest that discriminatory hiring behaviors based on sexual orientation hurt employers and shareholders financially and that implementing corporate sexual equality policies can enhance firms' financial performance, generating competitive advantages in labor markets and mutual benefits between employers and employees.

Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, such as education, urban location, and regional and demographic differences, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States for the period 2008-2010. Gay men are more likely to be in female-majority occupations than are heterosexual men, and lesbians are more represented in male-majority occupations than are heterosexual women, but even after accounting for this tendency, common to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity to concentrate in occupations that provide task independence or require social perceptiveness, or both. This study offers a theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.

This meta-analysis utilizes 24 papers published between 2012 and 2020 that focus on earnings differences by sexual orientation. The papers cover the period between 1991 and 2018, and countries in Europe, North America, and Australia. The metaanalysis indicates that gay men earned less than heterosexual men. Lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women, while bisexual men earned less than heterosexual men. Bisexual women earned less than heterosexual women. According to the meta-analysis, in data sets after 2010, gay men and bisexual men and women continue to experience earnings penalties, while lesbian women continue to experience earnings premiums. The persistence of earnings penalties for gay men and bisexual men and women in the face of anti-discrimination policies represents a cause for concern and indicates the need for comprehensive legislation and work-place guidelines to guarantee that people receive fair pay and not experience any form of workplace inequality simply because of their sexual orientation.