Economic Vulnerability of Sexual Minorities: Evidence from the US Household Pulse Survey

Abstract

Despite improvements in the legal and social environment, economic outcomes for LGBTQ individuals suggest a high degree of vulnerability. We use data on over 500,000 individuals collected from July 21, 2021 to May 9, 2022 as part of US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey which is the Bureau’s first survey to collect self-reported sexual orientation and gender identity. We use linear probability models to answer several questions related to the economic experience of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals during this time period. We find that lesbian women, bisexual women, and bisexual men were more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to be in a household that experienced pandemic related job loss. Bisexual men were more likely than heterosexual men to have difficulty paying their expenses, experience food insufficiency and experience housing insecurity in the last week. Lesbian and bisexual women were more likely than heterosexual women to report expense difficulty and food insufficiency. The vulnerability we observe may have been exacerbated by the pandemic but appears to be largely due to pre-existing—and likely continuing—inequalities.

Poverty among same-sex couple families in the United States: Is there a premium for married couples?

“…Not until around 2010 did scholarship begin to document the vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other (LGBTQ +) people and their children to poverty, a population that had been invisible in poverty studies until then (Albelda et al 2009;Badgett et al 2013;Prokos and Keene 2010). More recent studies also sustain that, when dealing with poverty, the LGBTQ + population is not a group to overlook (Badgett 2018;Schneebaum and Badgett 2019;Goldberg et al 2020;Carpenter et al 2020;Badgett et al 2021;Martell and Roncolato 2023). Drawing on various US data sets (including the American Community Survey, the Census, the Current Population Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey), scholarship shows that poverty affects sexual minorities at least as much as it does the rest of the population, which discards the stereotype of gay and lesbian affluence that had prevailed previously.…”

“…Poverty may affect the LGBTQ + population in a differentiated manner for several reasons, including the effect on earnings of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the broader consequences of stigma in terms of health and family connections, the differential attachment of individuals to the labor market depending on their sexual orientation and gender, together with their unequal access to marriage and, consequently, the disadvantage of same-sex couples with regards to taxation, health insurance coverage, social security benefits, or citizenship in case one of the partners was not born in the United States (Leppel 2009;Badgett 2010;Jepsen and Jepsen 2015; Del Río and Alonso-Villar 2019a; Badgett et al 2021;Friedberg and Isaac 2022;Martell and Roncolato 2023). Differences in sociodemographic factors associated with poverty may also cause differences by sexual orientation.…”

“…They were also more likely to be on governmental assistance, to take on debt to meet spending needs, to have high exposure to the virus due to by their concentration in particular industries, and to lack health insurance coverage(Whittington et al 2020;Martell and Roncolato 2023).…”