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The Gay & Lesbian Leadership SmartBrief describes the article as follows:
LGBT people aren’t necessarily “affluent” — lesbian couples have a greater chance of living in poverty than married, straight couples, and the children of gay and lesbian parents are twice as likely to be poor as their peers in families with married, straight parents, a groundbreaking study from UCLA’s Williams Institute has found.
Here’s the opening paragraphs from the Washington Blade‘s Gays, lesbians more likely to be poor than straights: report; Study undermines ‘myth’ of gay affluence:
A new report from a think-tank on sexual orientation reveals how poverty is affecting gay people in the United States.The report, released Friday by the Williams Institute at the University of California in Los Angeles, found that lesbian couples are more likely to be living in poverty than other couples.
The analysis found that 7 percent of lesbian couples are living below the poverty line, compared to 4 percent of gay male couples and 5 percent of opposite-sex couples.
The study also found that after “adjusting for a range of family characteristics that help explain poverty,” same-sex couples are “significantly” more likely to be poor than opposite-sex married couples.
Also, the study found that children of gay couples are living in poverty at a rate that is twice as much as the children of straight married couples.
The Williams Institute compiled the information by looking at the U.S. Census data from 2000, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the California Health Interview Surveys from 2003 and 2005…
The whole article is worth the read. The myth of gay and lesbian affluence is apparently just that — a myth.
9 Comments
unfortunately…This will feed the kkkristianist meme, “bu-bu-but think about the children ™.”
The hater group ADF is already featuring this story. Get ready to hear this one used AGAINST us in the fight for marriage equality.
Gah!
Either we are richer, and do not need “special” rights; or we are impoverished, and wouldn’t the chi’drens really be better off with a het family?
Gah!
I think they need to compare apples to apples and orange to orangesI believe the last I heard was that for every $1.00 a man makes a woman makes 79 cents. Was that taken into account? Also, I firmly believe that people with children are more likely to live in poverty – let’s face it, it takes money to feed, clothe, and educate a child! From what I’ve seen, I don’t think financially we’re all that different from our peers in the non-gay world.
I know several childless male couples who seem to have a lot of money, but I also know that I ain’t one of them.
I know several childless female couples who seem to have a lot of money, but I know several who don’t.
I know several G/L families who have children, some have a lot of money, some don’t.
A better comparison would be to match G/L people with the same positions and see how much they are paid in comparison to their straight peers.
I don’t really believe that sexual orientation per se is a true indicator of wealth.
The economy is the most important thingThere’s no time to worry about things like this, we have to focus all our energy on the economy. It doesn’t matter that:
- every day, gay and lesbian people die, leaving their partners without social security survivor benefits
- every day, gay and lesbian people die, leaving their partners with huge tax bills for inheritance
- every day, gay and lesbian people lose their job, and most of them live where they can’t get on their partner’s insurance
- every day, gay and lesbian families face the same challenges that straight families face, without the legal protections they have
None of that matters, because that’s about civil rights, not the economy. They’re only economic concerns when it’s straight people dealing with it.
Comparing by position…isn’t necessarily the best option, since there could well be a glass ceiling in many professions that affects LGBTs in the same way that it affects women, people of colour and people with disabilities.
Comparing by qualifications gained at school/college might be better. In theory, all other things being equal, LGBTs with a given qualification should do just as well as people from other social groups with the same qualification; if they’re not, you know there’s a problem – and it’s likely to be a glass ceiling.
I think this study best describes the following:…..gender discrimination, which is felt much, much, much (should I go on?), much more strongly by lesbians than by straight women, gay men and, obviously, straight men. I know many a butch dyke who are forced into jobs WAAAAAY beneath their intelligence levels (and therefore lower-paying) because they look too different to fit in at companies where pay is higher. I personally feel and will admit this is just my opinion, but I do believe that gay men can “pass” much easier on the whole than lesbians. I am not talking about transgender or transsexual. Just gay men who wear man-suits (and look damn good! and manly!) and butch lesbians who wear man-suits (and look damn good! and manly!). It’s just that the number of hiring managers and companies who appreciate and want to hire the lesbians is very small. Of course, this type of detail is not likely to be looked at in one of these studies. To me, this is simply proof of more discrimination against lesbians, and not a study that could be used to state that lesbians are unfit parents.
It’s like they are trying to say that because lesbians don’t make as much, they shouldn’t make as much. You know?
That’s a factorA glass ceiling is a wealth factor, as the end will show. If you can’t advance because you’ve bumped into it, you won’t make as much money.
Education is not always a good indicator either. I’ve know plumbers in the U.S. (some of whom never graduated high school) who made far more money than people with masters degrees. Same holds true with electricians, and other trades.
But even still, there are other factorsThat’s a start, but there are still other factors, such as whether or not a couple has children: whoever is the promary caretaker for children usually puts her (it’s usually a she) career on hold if not steps out altogether from the work force. This is a major reason for the discrepancy between “all men’s” and “all women’s” paychecks, because women are far more likely to stay home with kids, which penalizes their earnings from that point on. This in fact is one reason that SOME GLBT people have enjoyed more success in the working world, in the past, than their hetero (and usually married-with-kiddies) counterparts. Of course, the Fundys don’t hesitate to paint this with a “It’s because they’re not staying home with a FAMLLEEEE that they are able to be so rich” when they have referred to the supposed “rich gay” myth.
BUT: while this line:
should make the Fundys stop and think, but instead, they will predicatably spin it into “See? We need to keep those poor children out of those evil gay homes, because they will grow up poorer if we don’t!”
Good point except that…assuming the US works the same way as the UK, plumbers and electricians need qualifications to do their job – you can’t just walk onto a building site and say “I’m a plumber” – you have to go through training first. As I said, “LGBTs with a given qualification should do just as well as people from other social groups with the same qualification“. In theory LGBTs with a plumbing qualification should be earning, on average, about the same as straights with the same plumbing qualification. The same principle can be applied to any qualification.
Not Necessarily a MythThere are SGL people of and from all socioeconomic backgrounds…just like DGL people. The economic skewing that has created some “rich white gay men” couples is due to the unintended consequences of white supremacist and patriarchal machinations. We live in a society, that in the main, pays white men more than members of other demographic groups for the EXACT SAME WORK. Even some people who are MORE EDUCATED and HAVE MORE EXPERIENCE than their white male counterparts still get paid less for doing the EXACT SAME WORK…simply based on their gender and/or ethnicity/race.
These same white supremacist and patriarchal machinations create some “poor, POC, Lesbian/Bisexual” couples, who in the main also have children.
When you lump together “poor, POC, Lesbian/Bisexual” couples with children [the vast majority of the SGL/LGBT community] and “rich white gay men” couples without children(but maybe pets)…the end result will be that SGL/LGBTS are more likely to be poorer than heterosexuals. Add to this dynamic employment/payment discrimination based on a non-comforming SGL/LGBT of any ethnicity/race and the economic disparity is further explained.
Thankfully the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 passed and was signed into law by President Barack Obama. Next comes the passage of ENDA and the repeal of DADT and DOMA.
We are in the process of forming a more perfect union by putting into practice the noble words of our Founding Fathers. Funny, the documents they drafted wherein they proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. excluded approximately 90% of the population at the time (women, the indigenous peoples of America, enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and many unlanded and/or unlearnered white men).