Introduction to the Special Issue

• Date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12081
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Author: M. V. Lee Badgett

Introduction to the Special Issue

M. V. LEE BADGETT

Twenty years ago, no published research on lesbian, gay, and

bisexual (LGB) people existed in economics journals. Other social sciences,

particularly psychology and sociology (not surprisingly) and even political

science, already had vibrant communities of scholars with an interest in how

sexual orientation influenced the outcomes, institutions, and behavior studied

by those disciplines. That research included issues of stigma and its impact on

the lives of LGB people, whether in employment, the family, or law.

Given the prominence of interest in the family and in labor market discrimi-

nation in economics, two topics of theory that could be (and are now) applied

by economists to issues of sexual orientation, one might have expected econo-

mists to have eagerly jumped into a promising new area. So why didn’twe

see journal articles on these issues until the mid-1990s? Some of the barriers

to economists’work were surely professional: finding the kind of probability

samples valued in our discipline was close to impossible two decades ago, and

is still difficult. Other barriers were likely more sociological, as scholars might

have worried about being thought lesbian, gay, or bisexual themselves and

what effect that stigmatized status might have on their professional prospects

(Klawitter 1998).

As the 1990s progressed, though, the gay rights movement in the United

States started to become more visible and successful in ways that drew econo-

mists’attention both in the United States and in other countries. Issues that

economists could weigh in on grew in importance, as LGB people argued that

they faced employment discrimination and needed legal protection from that

discrimination. Interest in the LGB market grew as corporations sought out

new untapped niche markets, drawing on new data collected by market

research companies using convenience samples of LGB newspaper readers,

LGB organization members, and lists of LGB donors, among other sources.

Opponents of gay civil rights laws pointed to those allegedly high incomes of

LGB people in those surveys to argue that antidiscrimination laws were not

necessary to protect an affluent group of people.

*The authors’affiliations is, Center for Public Policy and Administration, University of Massachusetts

Amherst, Email: lbadgett@pubpol.umass.edu.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 54, No. 1 (January 2015). ©2014 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

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