First, ‘the rise of women’ should be understood more precisely as the rise of straight women. “As a whole, my results reveal two core demographic facts. “Across datasets and outcomes, I find consistent evidence that sexuality is a highly consequential axis of academic inequality, albeit in ways that vary sharply by sex,” says Mittleman. The percentages of male and female bisexuals attending college and university are significantly lower than for the other sexual minorities Mittleman studied. In recent decades, as white women have more than caught up with the advantage lesbians had had in university enrolment when ‘hetero-patriarchal’ views of women as homemakers dominated, black lesbians have continued to be largely frozen out of gains in higher education. Black, Hispanic and Asian gays also “surpass straight men by double digit margins”, he writes in “Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap: The education of lesbian, gay and bisexual America”. Using data from three different national surveys totalling 488,000 adults and one of 17,340 high school students, Mittleman shows that gay men’s educational advantage is not limited to white gays. Tweet Gay men are almost two times (44%) more likely to have a university degree than are their straight counterparts, says a study conducted in the United States by University of Notre Dame sociologist Joel Mittleman, soon to be published in the American Sociological Review.
