President Joe Biden on Monday, March 8, signed an executive order aimed at protecting students from discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity. The order directs the Secretary of Education and the U.S. Attorney General to review all existing regulations and policies to ensure that they comply with Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.
The U.S. Supreme Court last summer ruled, in Bostock v. Clayton County, that clauses in the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex included discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, but that did not automatically extend to Title IX.
Biden today also signed an order that will establish a Gender Policy Council to promote workplace diversity, fairness, and inclusion across the federal workforce and military and to combat gender-based violence.
According to the Williams Institute, an estimated 3.6 million students in the U.S. identify as LGBT, including about 150,000 who identify as transgender. The institute has conducted several studies documenting”widespread and pervasive harassment and bullying of LGBTQ+ students at school.”
Noting that about 5.1 percent of women in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ and that 24 percent of female same-sex couples are raising children, compared to 8 percent of male same-sex couples, Williams Institute’s research has found that “LGBT women, in particular women of color, are disproportionately impacted by unemployment, poverty and homelessness.
Christy Mallory, Williams Institute’s legal director, said, “President Biden’s executive orders signal a dedication by the federal government to protect two subpopulations of the LGBT community — LGBTQ students and women — from discrimination and its socioeconomic effects.”
Williams Institute research shows that about 2 million LGBTQ high school students live in states — like Texas — without explicit state-level statutory protections against discrimination in education. A 2019 study found that anti-bullying state laws that enumerate sexual orientation were associated with lower risk for suicide attempts and increased feelings of safety at school among high school students.
An analysis of high school students in four urban areas found that 22 percent of lesbian and gay youth and 11 percent of bisexual youth had missed school because they felt unsafe in the past month, compared to 7 percent of non-LGB students.
Gender non-conforming students reported higher levels of bullying and more school absences than other students.
The institute’s research also shows that 10 percent of LGBT women are unemployed, and 27 percent have annual incomes below $24,000, compared to 6 percent and 21 percent of non-LGBT women, respectively. Lesbian (17 percent) and straight (17 percent) women have higher poverty rates than gay (12 percent) and straight (13 percent) men. Studies show that 29 percent of bisexual women and transgender people (including transgender women) experience poverty.
In addition, 17 percent of LGB women have been homeless at some point in their lifetime, compared to 6 percent of the general population, while a 2020 study found one in three LGBT women experienced food insecurity in the year prior to the survey compared to one in five LGBT men.
Elimination of a gender wage gap would reduce the poverty rate for women in same-sex couples from 8 percent to 5 percent. Eliminating the racial wage gap would reduce the poverty rate for Black women in same-sex couples from 25 percent to 17 percent, and the rate for Hispanic women in same-sex couples would drop from 9 percent to 7 percent.
— Tammye Nash
