Gay men are far more likely to be educated than heterosexuals, says a recent study from the United States.
The biggest difference is in the highest degrees, ie doctoral degrees. Six percent of U.S. gays have a doctorate in law, medicine, or philosophy. The proportion is about half that of heterosexuals.
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“If America’s gay men formed their own country, this country would be the best educated in the world.”
Differential is also evident in lower university degrees.
52 percent of the country’s gay men and 36 percent of the country’s graduates have a bachelor’s degree. The big difference in degrees is also seen separately in different population groups, i.e. among Caucasians, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
“If American gay men formed their own country, this country would be the best educated in the world,” writes Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame Joel Mittleman from their research On Twitter.
Luxembourg currently has the highest number of university graduates in the world, at less than 47% of the population.
Mittleman’s study was published American Sociological Review newsletter. The research is also a free-to-read pre-publication service In Socarxiv.
In his research Mittleman looked at those who admitted to being gay, lesbian, and bisexual, and compared their careers to those who admitted to being straight.
Such a comparison has only become possible in recent years in the United States, as sexual orientation has begun to be questioned in population surveys and health surveys. The study was based on five such population data.
It is homosexual men who do exceptionally well academically.
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Deviating from a heterosexual norm can impair a school’s school performance.
As in Finland, women in the United States graduate more often than men. However, gay men also ignore women in education.
In the United States, lesbians – especially Caucasians – are more educated in the older generations than heterosexuals. In the younger generations, heterosexuals have passed a little.
In contrast, men and women who report themselves as bisexual do not differ significantly from heterosexual levels.
Mittleman according to which deviation from the heterosexual norm and the resulting discrimination lead to different consequences for different genders.
For boys, it seems to turn into an academic benefit, while for girls, it can undermine success in school careers.
In heterosexual boy culture, anti-schooling is one strong plot. Mittleman thinks that homosexual boys avoid this attitude, which hampers investing in schooling.
However, according to the researcher, it is not just a matter of gay boys being spared from out-of-school attitudes and therefore doing better in school than heterosexual peers.
Discrimination can also encourage investment in schooling.
Some scholars have called schools even the most homophobic institutions. When gays face discrimination in school social circles and feel the norms of masculinity feel alien to them, school success provides an area where the experience of gaining and gaining control is valid.
“When the other avenues of‘ being a man ’are closed, the pursuit of a prestigious career with first-class performance provides a way to strengthen one’s position as a man,” Mittleman writes.
For lesbians, the pattern would seem to go differently.
According to Mittleman, the prejudices of school staff about how girls should be explain the somewhat lower level of education of the younger generation of lesbians than heterosexuals.
If a lesbian behaves, talks, and dresses “masculine,” she won’t sit in the image of a “decent girl” favored by the school and get paid for it in her school success.
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Gender and sexual minorities in Finland experience more school violence than others.
In Finland it has not been reported that there are differences in the educational attainment of sexual minorities compared to the heterosexual majority.
The school route is often much more difficult for Finnish rainbow youth than for heterosexuals, reminds the docent of educational sociology at the University of Helsinki Jukka Lehtonen.
Lehtonen has been researching the school and career choices of non-heterosexual and transgender people for 20 years.
She says gender and sexual minorities experience more school violence than others.
The feeling of not being included, loneliness and isolation, as well as anxiety and depression are also more common in rainbow youth.
“Dropping out of school and going out of school are more typical of sexual and especially gender minorities. They are also more often than average among the so-called neet young people, ”says Lehtonen.
Neet young people are young people who are neither in school nor at work.
Lehtonen however, says it has also made observations about better school performance for non-heterosexual boys.
According to Lehtonen, they can invest in schooling for many different reasons. They may have more time for it because, for example, they do not participate in the rushes of the boy groups or focus on socializing patterns.
Academic success can also be a way to gain the appreciation that Mittlemank also referred to.
“Part of it may be about suppressing one’s sexuality in adolescence, when energy can be used for studies instead of sex and socializing,” Lehtonen reflects.
He emphasizes that non-heterosexual boys are quite a diverse group.
“Some are school dropouts and some are successful, others in between. However, perhaps there are relatively more school successes among them than among heterosexual boys. ”
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