Dana Rudoph at Keen News Service looks at the findings from a Harvard researcher’s recent study on anti-LGBT job discrimination.
Rudolph reports that the researcher sent 1,769 pairs of fictitious resumes to private employers in seven states, including, you guessed it, Texas. Each pair of resumes consisted of one from an obviously gay man and one from an apparently straight one.
Overall, the study found that the straight applicants were 1.5 times more likely to receive callbacks on their resumes than the gay applicants. The straight applicants had to apply for fewer than nine jobs before getting an interview, whereas the gay ones had to apply for almost 14. But the results varied widely across the seven states:
In New York, Pennsylvania, and California, the gap between callbacks for gay and heterosexual “applicants” was insignificant.
But in Texas, résumés of heterosexual men received more than three times as many callbacks as those of gay men. Heterosexual men would need to apply for only eight jobs to get an interview, versus 27 for gay men.
In Ohio, résumés of heterosexual men received over two-and-a-half times as many callbacks, and in Florida, almost twice as many.
The full study, “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States,” can be found in the September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Sociology.
And, just how can anyone read a resume and determine that it was from an obviously ‘gay’ man? Sounds like a bunch hogwash to me. Was the resume on ‘pink’ paper with sequins around the edges or did the resume include the size of the writer’s endowments? That anyone would waste the time for a study like this is even stuidier than the comments, LOL! I’m just an average lay person and I can tell you without any time wasted on research that an employer would rather hire a qualified, straight person for the job. Probably close to 100% of the time if there are two equally qualified applicants and one is obviously gay, the employer will hire the straight person. And, I can tell you why…being gay myself, I believe that most straight people are more well adjusted and stable than most straight people. And, it makes sense that most employers would rather have the person for the job that is the most well adjusted and stable. Now you should send me the money for the research that I didn’t have to do cause I already had the answer to the question.
Wow.. KWills.. Internalized homophobia much?