Ann Bailey
Gay advocacy groups continue to beat the drum that gays suffer from employment discrimination, but it seems that the problem is exactly the opposite. Homosexuals actually enjoy a “wage premium.” They earn 2.5% more than a similarly-situated heterosexual earner. Yep, what you might have been observing in your own work environment for years – gay individuals receiving preferential treatment in opportunity, advancement and salary– is really happening.
Two economists, Geoffrey Clarke and Purvi Sevak, have studied and quantified it. They note in their work that was recently published in the journal Economics Letters that in the 1980’s and first years of the 1990’s there was a small “gay wage penalty.” But by the mid-1990s that “wage penalty” had evaporated and gay individuals on average have been earning more than their heterosexual peers since the year 2000. Let me repeat that: Gays have been earning more than straight individuals for closing in on 15 years.
You might be saying that 2.5% isn’t much – well, isn’t it? Get out your calculator and run the numbers. If you earned $50,000 a year and it held steady at that amount for a 40-year work career, 2.5% more salary would mean that you would have earned an extra $50,000. If you earned $75,000 a year, at the end of that same 40-year career, you would have earned an extra $75,000. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of money to me. So who is it that is really being discriminated against?
Yet the U.S. Senate fell for the powerful gay lobby’s arm-twisting and recently passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The next stop is the House of Representatives where the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, indicates that the bill is going nowhere. But please don’t take that for granted; contact your Congressman/Congresswoman, and tell them to “Vote No on ENDA.”
The next time someone tries to tell you that LGBT individuals are being discriminated against, tell them you know better. Communities and states don’t need non-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation, either. These bills are local versions of ENDA. Make sure that all your elected representatives know that as a straight individual, you’re tired of being discriminated against.