It pays to be gay — or at least, it used to. In an op-ed for The Financial Times, journalist and economics columnist Soumaya Keynes wrote that while lesbian women have earned more than their heterosexual counterparts in the past few decades, this “lesbian pay premium” is now shrinking, citing a 2021 study by Lee Badgett, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Anglia Ruskin University economics professor Nick Drydakis’ meta-analysis of 24 studies from 2012 to 2020 found that lesbian women enjoy a pay premium over heterosexual women in the workforce. The studies, which look at data from 1991 to 2018, show that lesbians earn seven percent more than straight women on average, while gay men earn up to 16 percent less than heterosexual men.
According to Drydakis, one of the reasons for the pay gap may be that lesbian women are stereotypically perceived as demonstrating leadership and having more masculine characteristics. Another explanation is that women with children earn less than those without children. Drydakis writes, “Lesbian women might prove less likely to have children than married women, so it makes sense that they may earn more because of their commitment to the labor market.” A lesbian woman is also less likely to engage with a heterosexual man, who would stereotypically provide for her, so she “might invest more in a workplace career.”
Keynes points out that heterosexual women experience a “persistent” income drop after giving birth, and that lesbian parents only see a decrease in their income for two years, citing a study on child penalty. Also called “motherhood penalty,” child penalty pertains to employment losses experienced by women after having children.
However, the pay gap between lesbian women and heterosexual women appears to be closing. Badgett, along with co-authors Christopher S. Carpenter and Dario Sansone, found that while the hourly wage gap between gay men and heterosexual men has been relatively stable over the years, the lesbian pay premium dropped from 10.34 percent in 2000 to 0.9 percent in 2018.
In the American Economic Association’s Research Highlights Podcast, Badgett expressed interest in exploring the disappearance of the gap and what may be causing it. “It might be that heterosexual women are doing better and have more experience now,” she said. “It might be that lesbians are more visible now, so there’s actually more discrimination against them to balance out what other advantages they have.”
Pay Equity in the Philippines
According to a 2023 working paper by Ateneo de Manila University Associate Professor Geoffrey M. Ducanes and University of Southampton economics researcher Vincent Jerald Ramos, Filipino women with more children suffered larger economic losses, pointing to a “motherhood penalty in the labor market” caused by the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines.
In the country, women faced a 28 percent gender wage gap in 2023, the World Economic Forum (WEF) reports.
In the WEF’s 2024 Global Gender Gap Index, the Philippines ranked 25th out of 146 countries in gender parity, making it one of the leading countries in Eastern Asia and the Pacific despite having dropped nine places, ranking 16th in gender parity in 2023.
As Drydakis mentions in another study on sexual orientation and labor market outcomes, the lack of legal recognition of same sex unions “in most of Africa and Asia” make gay and lesbian studies more difficult to conduct. This may explain why the Philippines lacks wage gap data based on sexual orientation, as well as data on motherhood penalties as they apply to lesbian and heterosexual women.
