Questioning Questionable Research 2: The Myth Of Gay Money

Economist Lee Badgett says equal treatment for gays and lesbians can benefit economies from Virginia to India. For the past two decades, she’s mined data in her quest to prove it.

“My long-run goal has always been the same: It’s using research to help create a more just world,” said Badgett, 54, director of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Center for Public Policy and Administration. “When policy makers can pick out their favorite myth about gay people to hang their policy on, it’s pretty hard to argue against.” ...

She broke into her field with a 1995 paper debunking the idea that gay men are richer than their heterosexual counterparts. In the early 1990s, she was studying gender and racial discrimination as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland at College Park when she read a newspaper article that labeled gays a marketer’s dream, citing their above-average affluence.

Lee Badgett

“I thought: ‘This is really interesting. I know a lot of LGBT people -- I am one -- and this doesn’t characterize the people that I know,’” she said. “I needed better data, so that was really the quest. Marketing data wasn’t going to cut it for economists.”

Badgett used the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey to show that gay and bisexual male workers made between 11 percent and 27 percent less than heterosexual men with similar experience, education and region of residence.

“Lee’s seminal research on the economics of sexual orientation was critical,” said Marieka Klawitter, a University of Washington economist in Seattle who published studies on gays after Badgett. “The myths that gays were all rich, carefree, without families, led to the perception that they didn’t face discrimination.” ...

Bloomberg.

Astonishing how junkonomics about the pink pound/dollar are still regularly regurgitated without question.

Well, it's not really is it?

You'd think some 20 years on certain journalists might take notice.

For an exhaustive demolition job on the myth of gay affluence see Joe Clark's Gay Money: The truth about lesbian and gay economics - a project he began after reading Badgett's first paper.