Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap: The Education of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual America

Joel Mittleman

American Sociological Review, 2022, vol. 87, issue 2, 303-335

Abstract: Although gender is central to contemporary accounts of educational stratification, sexuality has been largely invisible as a population-level axis of academic inequality. Taking advantage of major recent data expansions, the current study establishes sexuality as a core dimension of educational stratification in the United States. First, I analyze lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults’ college completion rates: overall, by race/ethnicity, and by birth cohort. Then, using new data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009, I analyze LGB students’ performance on a full range of achievement and attainment measures. Across analyses, I reveal two demographic facts. First, women’s rising academic advantages are largely confined to straight women: although lesbian women historically outpaced straight women, in contemporary cohorts, lesbian and bisexual women face significant academic disadvantages. Second, boys’ well-documented underperformance obscures one group with remarkably high levels of school success: gay boys. Given these facts, I propose that marginalization from hegemonic gender norms has important—but asymmetric—impacts on men’s and women’s academic success. To illustrate this point, I apply what I call a “gender predictive†approach, using supervised machine learning methods to uncover patterns of inequality otherwise obscured by the binary sex/gender measures typically available in population research.

Keywords: education; gender and sexuality; stratification; gay and lesbian studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:amsocr:v:87:y:2022:i:2:p:303-335

DOI: 10.1177/00031224221075776

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