Do Lesbians Earn More Than Heterosexual Women?

Jan. 3, 2011— -- Lesbians who never married earned significantly more than previously married lesbians and heterosexual women, Census data suggests.

Economists say the older data has implications for home-work division for heterosexual and homosexual couples, but bloggers have only recently proposed their own theories for what generated the results.

The findings, based on the 2000 Census, concluded that never-married lesbians earned roughly 7.5 percent more than never-married singles, 9.6 percent more than previously married singles, and 5 percent more than currently married women.

The average wage of a lesbian was $18.70 per hour while the average hourly wage of cohabitating heterosexual females was $13.35.

The earnings of previously married lesbian partners, on the other hand, were not statistically different from the wages earned by married women. They were also not statistically different from the wages earned by single and cohabiting heterosexuals who never married. Previously married lesbians, however, do earn slightly more than previously married singles (2.3 percent).

The article is entitled "Previous Marriage and the Lesbian Wage Premium," published in the economics journal Industrial Relations in 2009.

Nasser Daneshvary, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was surprised that bloggers from the New York Times, Atlantic Wire and Jezebel were only now reacting to the research, which was actually concluded in 2007.

"I was surprised and didn't know there was any media follow-up," said Daneshvary, who is now researching real estate in the Las Vegas housing market. He said President Obama's recent repeal of "Don't ask don't tell" policy is one possibility for the resurging interest in the research.

Daneshvary and two other economics professors at the University of Nevada -- Jeff Waddoups and Brad Wimmer -- chose to research the topic because they had studied labor market discrimination focused on differences in such demographic characteristics as race, ethnicity, gender and immigrant status.