gay identities and occupational segregation

Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, an emeritus guest blogger, have written an article in Slate about the clustering of LBGT workers into specific occupations. In other words, is there any truth to the view that LBGT people tend to go into specific professions like cosmetology? Fisman and Sullivan use an ASQ paper to discuss the issue. The idea is simple – LBGT people probably are attracted to jobs that either (a) require subtle interactional skills, which they have cultivated because they live in a hostile environment or (b) they seek jobs where they can work by themselves so they don’t have to deal with hostility or constantly trying to stay submerged. From Fisman and Sullivan’s analysis:

The central thesis of Tilcsik, Anteby, and Knight’s paper is that gays and lesbians will tend to be employed at high rates in occupations that require social perceptiveness, allow for task independence, or both. They test their theory using data from the American Community Survey—a gargantuan study of nearly 5 million Americans conducted annually by the U.S. Census Bureau—and the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), an ongoing study that has followed the same group of Americans since 1994. All Add Health respondents were in middle or high school in the mid-1990s, so they were just beginning to settle into their careers around 2008, the year the study uses for its analyses. Both data sets include questions that can be used to infer sexual orientation, as well as information on respondents’ occupations.

The authors connected these data to assessments of the extent to which particular jobs require social perceptiveness and whether they allow for task independence, which come from ratings from the Occupational Information Network, a survey of employees on what they see as their job requirements and attributes. The survey seems particularly well-suited to the researchers’ task. One question asks the extent to which workers “depend on themselves rather than on coworkers and supervisors to get things done” (task independence), while another asks whether “being aware of others’ reactions and understanding why they react as they do is essential to the job” (social perceptiveness).

The link between these attributes and sexual orientation is immediately apparent from browsing the list of the top 15 occupations with the highest proportions of gay and lesbian workers. Every single one scores relatively high on either social perceptiveness or task independence, and most vocations score high on both. According to the authors’ calculations, the proportion of gays and lesbians in an occupation is more than 1.5 times higher when the job both has high task independence and requires social perceptiveness.

Clever paper! The paper is also an excellent contribution to studies of occupational segregation that go beyond stories of human capital. Recommended!

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