Marriage (In)equality: Does the Sexual Orientation Wage Gap Persist Across Marital Status?

Since the first empirical paper on the topic more than two decades ago (Badgett, 1995), the common story in the literature on wages and sexual orientation has been that gay men face a wage penalty compared to heterosexual men while lesbians are paid the same as or more than heterosexual women. However, none of the papers in the literature have thoroughly addressed the role of marital status in these wage gaps. Using data from the 2013-2015 American Community Survey and OLS as well as selection-corrected estimators, we show that the gay male penalty exists only for the group of married men, while the lesbian wage premium persists across marital status but is smaller for married lesbians.