The gender income gap, squared

Luc Guillemot

Hello hello hello, today we are looking at the gender income gap with an intersectional lens — how being part of a minority can sometimes lead to some advantage and sometimes to double the prejudice.

Income inequalities based on gender are pervasive. In the United States, women typically earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. It should come as no surprise, then, that same-sex male households get double the gender privilege. Indeed, men living together in a long-term relationship are on average richer than both female couples and opposite-sex households.

The cliché goes that male couples prefer to live in big cities whereas female couples are said to prefer smaller towns or rural areas. Big cities usually mean higher paid jobs and industries with overall higher incomes — San Francisco being the quintessential illustration, as the U.S city with the highest percentage of same-sex households and also high average salaries. And in fact, more than 70% of San Francisco's same-sex couples are men. We could also view this in reverse, and say that male couples are more likely to be able to afford the cost of living in big coastal cities.

These numbers portray an important aspect of the gay community, but don't reflect the whole reality. They only describe the living situation of couples who share a household.^[1] LGBTQIA+ people as a whole group are poorer than the general population, with 22% of queer adults living in poverty in the U.S. in 2021, compared to 16% of their straight, cisgender counterparts. The poverty rates increase even more for trans adults and bisexual women (29%), and even more for Black or Latino transgender adults. Intersectionality matters!

Methodologically, these statistics also miss the reality of the queer community by using a reductive classification of individuals on a gender binary, whereas the experienced reality of gender more often falls on a spectrum. They also don’t represent the diversity of the community, where individuals who are bisexual or pansexual may pass as straight in this dataset because they live in an opposite-sex household. (On bisexual erasure, read my colleague Toni’s excellent Weekly Chart!) This is a typical limitation of trying to quantify and fit individuals into categories that necessarily dumb down the complexity of what they try to capture. Gender and sexuality are rather queer. Kevin Guyan illustrated the oxymoronic nature of "queer data" and highlighted the necessary complexity of statistics about queer identities.

I wanted to share these numbers about same-sex households anyway, first of all to highlight a paradox that often makes me personally uneasy: being part of the discriminated gay community, while still profiting from male privilege. And second, by contrast, to shine a light on the inequalities within the community itself.

Thanks for reading! Come back next week for a Weekly Chart by our Weekly Chart expert: Rose herself!

1. The data in the first chart concerns only married couples, for better comparison with data on opposite-sex households. The scatterplot deals with couples who live together and describe themselves as a household, regardless of marital status. ↩︎

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Luc Guillemot

(he/they, @Luc) is a developer on Datawrapper’s visualization team. Before that, he created visualizations as a data journalist and social scientist. When not making sure your labels have the correct position, you can spot him running in the forests around Berlin or listening to hyperpop.

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