When we talk about the gender gap in education, we usually think of boys falling behind. From the earliest years of schooling, girls tend to do better on measures of academic skills and classroom behaviour, and that advantage continues all the way to higher education. But what happens when you look not only at gender, but also at sexual identity?
New research by Joel Mittleman reveals surprising – and sometimes uncomfortable – patterns. Using three large national surveys and a longitudinal study of US high school students, he mapped for the first time, at scale, how lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) students and adults fare in education.
The first finding is striking: gay men are more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than any other group, even more than heterosexual women. This pattern holds across ethnic groups and generations.
The story for lesbian women is different. In older cohorts, especially among white women, they had higher education levels than heterosexual women. In more recent generations, that advantage has vanished – and sometimes turned into a disadvantage. Bisexual women, in particular, have lower average outcomes across almost every measure.
Among young people in the most recent cohort, the differences show up in grades, course choices, study motivation and peer networks. Gay boys take more advanced courses, achieve higher grades, and are more likely to enrol in university. Lesbian and bisexual girls are more likely to drop out, have fewer “school-oriented” friends, and report lower grades.
One thing is consistent: across all LGB groups, students report more discrimination and minority stress than their straight peers, even those who perform well academically. Mittleman argues that distance from dominant gender norms may play a role: for boys, stepping away from “hegemonic masculinity” can boost academic performance, while for girls, distancing from “hegemonic femininity” can undermine it.
The analysis exposes an overlooked blind spot in how we think about educational inequality. Sexual identity isn’t a side note – it’s a significant dimension of inequality, and it plays out differently for men and women.
Abstract of the study:
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 America. 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 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.