Gay Men More Discriminated Against Than Lesbian Women

The University of New Hampshire Whittemore School of Business and Economics has released the results of a study that shows there is a great discrepancy between the way gay men and lesbian women are treated in the work place.

For instance, they show that gay men who have jobs in management as well as blue collar jobs that are the jobs where men usually dominate discriminated against in so far as they make less then straight men in the same positions.

But the same survey shows that the same discrimination is not practiced against lesbians.

The results of the study show that gay men who live together actually make 23% less than a married man and 9% less than a straight man who is unmarried but lives with a woman. The areas where the differences are the greatest are in the managerial filed and blue collar jobs such as building maintenance and grounds keeping, construction jobs and extraction and production.

They also found that lesbians are not similarly discriminated against as compared to heterosexual women. The researchers feel that a possible reason for this is that while there may still be some discriminatory attitudes toward lesbians, they are considered to be very focused on their careers and less likely to leave the job market as a heterosexual woman might to raise children, for instance. The study shows that 18.1% of lesbians have children while with the heterosexual women it is 49.4%

The authors make reference to other studies that focused on the attitudes of straight men to gay men and lesbians and they found that they show that there is a stronger prejudice against the gay men. They found in other studies that gay men are more likely than lesbians to be the victim of violence due to their sexual preference.