Gay men earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at the highest rate in the US | Hacker News Reader

Gay men earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at the highest rate in the US

phys.org

116 pointsBostonian119 comments

> this hypothesis proposes that gay men respond to societal homophobia by overcompensating in achievement-related domains. Reflecting on this possibility, Mittleman suggests that "academic performance offers an accessible domain of competitive self-mastery. Whereas the rules of masculinity may feel obscure or unattainable, the rules of school can feel discrete and manageable. Whereas the approval of a parent may be uncertain, the praise of a teacher can be regularly earned [...]

This seems like a lot of fun freud-esque-imaginative conjecture, but did the study not consider the more simple possibility that it failed to control for the population of gay males who do not identify or express as such: i.e. it over-selected for people who are 'out'.

I'd say it's more plausible that gay males who are burdened with more shame (and historic trauma) around their sexuality are less likely to self-identify and self-report as gay and so the remaining 'out' population of gay males are those who are sufficiently comfortable or free of fear to be 'out'. Things contributing to this outness may include: a high level of family support, exposure to validating media, exposure to more educated and enlightened peers and friends, etc. I.e. extremely unsurprising factors in academic achievement.

EDIT: FWIW, reflecting on my own experiences, I _do_ believe there are _some_ performative compensations that occur in response to lack of acceptance or conformity. But there are many axes of difference and non-acceptance that would have to be unpacked there. This study and its commentary seems to do so little service to a highly complex and highly interactional set of factors. It's a wasp's nest of confounding variables that would be almost impossible to navigate scientifically IMO.

That was my first thought as well

Indeed, this explanation of straight-up correlation seems way more plausible to me personally. I’d imagine that boys from supportive, well-educated, open-minded families are more likely to both openly identify as gay, and achieve academic success.

But this is just a gut feeling of course. I guess it’s equally plausible that boys from less accepting backgrounds are more likely to see college or university as an escape from that environment.

Likewise, that explanation would fail to explain the opposite outcome for girls - but of course they face an entirely different set of cultural challenges.

It seems quite hard to draw any interesting conclusions without more extensive controls.

I think it is the other way round: people who are part of an open minded academic environment are more likely to come out then let's say people in a conservative workers class environment.

I'm gay.

I almost want to say it's the reverse: Gay men need to go through all the stages of denial before they come out and then, sometimes, witness it in whoever they come out too. I would then say trying to prove yourself _because_ you cannot achieve masculine ideals is moot.

This _does_ however apply to gay men who _aren'_ out. They need to overcompensate because they want to be ready in case they are shunned; i.e. if they are successful they won't need their family's support.

I was not out in college (in the early 80's), though I would have probably answered I was gay on an anonymous survey.

I didn't have any of the advantages you list of being out. For me, work and school in my teens and 20's were ways to avoid having to deal with being gay. You have to spend your time doing something, and for me, not being out meant I didn't have gay friends, I didn't relate that well to straight friends who might try to fix me up with girls, talk about girls, etc., I wasn't interested in dating girls, and pursuing men was totally outside my realm of possibility. So what's left? Work, school, music. These allowed me to feel good about what I was doing with my life at a time when I wasn't ready to deal with my sexuality.

So yeah, I can totally relate to this. In fact, I'd say closeted gay guys are more focused on school than out guys because they mostly don't have a social life to distract them from academics.

In a similar way, I'd guess that by percentage of the respective populations, gay guys are more accomplished musicians than straight guys too. Why? Because music is a difficult, time-consuming activity that requires a lot of dedication and is highly respected by society. Its perfect for a young gay guy looking for something productive to do that doesn't involve dating and sexuality.

Thank you, especially for that last paragraph.

What you describe in the last paragraph is, I think, the reason so many gay men join/ed the priesthood. Celibacy is less of a sacrifice / it is/was a highly respected thing a man who doesn't want to marry can do.

> something productive to do that doesn't involve dating and sexuality.

Ah, not popular music, then? ;)

To your point (somewhat), but focusing simply on the data and analysis:

It needs to be determined / stated when someone identified as gay. Before college, during, immediately after, long after?

This study also focuses on college graduates, not simply attendees, I believe. I'm not sure (i.e., I'll have to think about it) but it feels like that could factor in somewhere as well.

"Gay males who do not identify or express as such" are not actually gay – they're considered "men who sleep with men" or homosexuals. Gay is a chosen identity that piggybacks on msm behaviors, so the idea that the study didn't control for the fact that they're just looking at men who are out seems completely beside the point as it's literally about gay men. (You can be gay and in the closet but not all men who sleep with men identify as gay.)

It's sorta like a study saying "married women get pregnant more often" and then balking that the study didn't control for the fact that women who get married have a second caregiver for a child. Like, yeah, that's the whole point.

The question from the NHIS survey (1 of the 3 data sources) is:

> Do you think of yourself as ^gaylesbian; straight, that is, not ^gaylesbian; bisexual; something else; or you don't know the answer?

Your data is dependent on how respondents interperet that prompt.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/2019nhis.htm (English Questionare, page 432)

This sounds like trying to enforce an identity label that not everyone agrees with.

That hypothesis is probably true for most engineers, gay and straight.

I think it's not uncommon to hear gay people saying they can't have 'normal' lives so they seek intensity where they can, art, science or else.

ps: sibling messages seem to confirm that view. Also note that it's not only related to closeted situations. People stuck in bad situations have to compensate. We need to have an influx of blissful stimulation and living means finding it no matter where.

The thing is, being gay is probably a random distribution or even a gradient with no clear border, just like being "black" (a brazilian, a jamaican, a nigerian and a french blacks are all black but all very different, both in color gradient of their skin color and cultural meaning of it - it s almost meaningless), so it's probably as wrong to say "gay men are earning degrees faster than before" as to say "blue eyed tall people are earning degrees faster than before".

Or, in other simpler words, there are no gay men, just complex multi faceted individuals whose sexuality trends towards same sex mates amongs a myriad of other things happening in their lives.

I think your first sentence sort of debunks your point. If gayness is randomly distributed then we might expect there would be a similar ratio of educated to uneducated gays to that of society at large. The fact that the ratio is instead biased towards more educated overachievers in the gay community indicates that gayness confers some sort of statistical benefit in regards to achievement/education.

It plausible, but I think sexuality, emotional intimacy .. are key factors in ones life. I personally had other troubles regarding those and the day they went away I realized how my life would have been different if I could have just played the games my buddy played as teens while I was head stuck in the sand obsessing about some intellectual stuff.

Personally, my academic achievement was motivated by a desire to get out of the environment where I grew up (where I was very much not out). I’ve met others with the same story.

This was my story as well, though I was out at the age of 13. Homophobia, for better or worse, has been a major driving force in my life. PhD student now. Also working toward second masters.

I wonder if the linkage is reversed, and if there is a reporting bias. Could it be that gay men in a position to earn a degree are more likely to be openly gay, as they would likely come from a more well off, potentially more accepting background?

This was my first thought too. In lower social classes being openly gay is much harder.

I think a likely explanation is that gay men with lower levels of education are more likely to hide that they are gay. I am gay and to add some anecdata: I am pretty highly educated: PhD. My first boyfriend has a rather low education and was much less out. Not at work, for instance, and he would quite likely not have trusted that the questionaire would remain anonymous.

At the college I went to the gay men were very sexually active, with each other, much more so than most hetero men who spent much more time in sexual pursuit than arrival. So I wonder if some small part of the difference might be that the straight men were more distracted by their unmet needs.

Reading your story, it seems to me that gay men are the ones more distracted by our unmet needs.

One common refrain used to discriminate against gay people has been that they are "sexual deviants".

Casually throwing out an anecdotal guess that gay people are more college educated because of all the sex they're having is frankly shocking to read.

If you're not intentionally discriminating, at the very least you're stereotyping the amount of sexual activity of people based on their sexual orientation and your anecdotal experiences.

> based on their sexual orientation and your anecdotal experiences.

Jump on grindr and see how long it takes to get a hook up vs tinder.

Men (gay or straight) are more outwardly sexual and less selective than women. Seems like a water is wet kind of obvious.

I think you can get a pretty good idea by counting the bath houses.

In Toronto gay bath houses greatly outnumber the only one straight bath house, and there are zero lesbian bath houses. This seems to corroborate your theory.

I mean even if what you're suggesting is true, there could be dozens of reasons for that. There's still plenty of places in the US where you'll be discriminated against for being openly gay in public, leaving the relative anonymity of apps more necessary for gay people who want to hook up. You're just again stereotyping gay people and saying they have lots of sex.

The point is that these types of stereotypes have been, and are still being used today, to discriminate against gay people. Casually suggesting it's true and using it to explain subsequent actions of gay people, with no data or evidence to back it up, is just going to give more fuel to the sterotyping and discriminating that's going on.

Where's the data? Is it just gay people who have lots of sex that are more likely to hold a degree? Does this hold true for straight people? Do I need to have sex 3 times per week to get a college degree or can get by with just one per week?

You're just making assumptions about gay people sexual habits.

Or just look at the difference between the average number of partners for straight and gay males. (It's an order of magnitude difference!)

Is it true that college-age gay men have more sex than college-age straight men? The post was an anecdote (and anecdotes are fine) but the question is empirical and there's probably solid research on it. Anyway, all statistics are stereotyping.

As far as the article goes, Harold Bloom (the western canon guy who died a while back) argued that gay and bi people are significantly overrepresented among great writers and poets. I'm not sure if he had a theory as to why.

> At the college I went to the gay men were very sexually active, with each other,

I guess the college would have had a real problem if the gay men were very sexually active with heterosexual men or with women.

What is the problem with that as long as it is consensual? Gay men certainly have sex with straight women and men. I know a gay man that was married to a women for 30 years and fathered 3 children.

I was being sarcastic

Do they account for where they went to school? I went to a fairly rural high school. Pretty much everyone who turned out to be gay went to university, because it's a good choice if you want to go move to the city.

A lot of poor / undereducated groups are more likely to be a little homophobic, so moving to go to university is a way out. If you don't go to university (or join the military) you're choosing to stay with your existing connections, and if you're poor or rural and gay this may be less desirable.

This isn't too much of a surprise. How else do you get tf out of your small, homophobic town and into a community of other queer people? College! And how do you keep yourself from having to go back to that town or being on the streets cause your parents kicked you out? Get a career!

A couple other comments here have said the same thing, and I strongly believe this is the actual reason. Queer people flock to cities to improve their dating pool and social acceptance. College is a legitimate way to move to a city (and meet other gay peers). Source: have a fair amount of gay friends.

On the other hand, if you already live in a liberal metropolitan area, it's potentially more likely that more of your peers go to college so you go too (no source here, just spitballin).

>His research aligns with what professors Mark Hatzenbuehler and John Pachankis (of Harvard and Yale, respectively) called the "Best Little Boy in the World" hypothesis. Drawing from Andrew Tobias' memoir, "The Best Little Boy in the World," this hypothesis proposes that gay men respond to societal homophobia by overcompensating in achievement-related domains.

I always find it fascinating when extremely well-respected university folks make write-ups that confirm what is dead obvious to anyone who belongs to the group being studied.

I feel like sometimes scientists don't have enough respect or humilty. The human brain is a very complex thing, that we don't understand fully. But somehow, if something hasn't been proved through science, it has no value. I met a few people that have a very strong belief from anything that comes with "academic credentials" but reject/ask for proof for anything else. While I understand that academic credentials may have more value that just someone saying something, the experience of people actually living things can matter a lot.

Scientists as a group have so much humility that if they're not literally excited to be proven wrong, on their most deeply held understanding of the fundamentals of their field, then they're not considered to be scientists.

Ha ha, if only.

Some concrete exemples might help your case. Science wants to be humble. The people we hold as examples of very careful, meticulous scientists (like Cochrane) have very weak beliefs and a lot of quantified doubt about everything.

Science shouldn't be trusted blindly, because it's an incremental process not an Oracle of Truth.

But random people with opinions, in my experience, are even more likely to have strong beliefs and overconfidence in them.

It's bad when leaders make choices based on unproven ideas because of the impact that can have on people.

If I told all my friends that drinking hot sauce made me smarter, then yeah, drinking hot sauce has some value for me individually. If I told some scientists the same thing, they might think about it and analyze what the possible mechanism was, whether I actually became snarter, etc, but the idea of drinking hot sauce has absolutely no value to society until someone can prove it works. The value to science is in a possible research path, if it somewhat fits with what we know about reality.

That's why I ask and search for proof. I don't want to be tricked into drinking hot sauce for no reason.

I'm gay and I don't find it obvious or convincing that it's about societal homophobia. Moreover, that wouldn't explain the gap between straight and lesbian women, either.

> Moreover, that wouldn't explain the gap between straight and lesbian women, either.

I don't think the homophobia against lesbian women and the homophobia against gay men is the same.

I'm only bi, but this isn't obvious at all to me. In fact it seems obviously wrong. Most marginalized groups don't "overcompensate in achievement-related domains", and I don't see what mechanism would make LGBT people be any different.

More plausible to me is that these studies can't capture the true concentration of gay people, only the concentration of out gay people. And it's easier to be out, to the rest of the world and to yourself, when you're in an environment that won't punish you for it. And richer environments tend to be less homophobic, so even if the concentration of gay people is the same, more will be out in the richer parts of society.

I grew up in an very homophobic, very poor rural community, and convinced myself I was straight. Then when I went to college I had basically my first exposure to openly gay people and eventually realized I had been deluding myself. That would probably never had happened if I stayed in my hometown.

> Most marginalized groups don't "overcompensate in achievement-related domains", and I don't see what mechanism would make LGBT people be any different.

A significant difference is that for the LGBT people, revealing their marginalized status is a choice. A Black kid can't pretend to be white, but a gay kid can pretend to be straight (or their birth gender). Adults can as well, but being able to get an education in the in group seems like a significant difference.

I doubt it's emotionally healthy to do so, but neither is getting discriminated against. Even having the option between a rock and a hard place might give people a sense of control over their lives that they lack if their only option is getting discriminated against.

Familial achievement might also be related. Many marginalized groups have highly heritable traits, like skin tone or facial features. Their families have been discriminated against for generations. Many LGBT people are born into non-marginalized families, so the median familial income might be higher. There might be data on this, but I couldn't find it easily, so I could be totally off base.

I'm not proposing that's the reasoning behind this effect, just pointing out there is a mechanism by which there would be a reasonable difference. Neither of those would account for the difference in college graduation rates for lesbians vs gay men, though.

> what is dead obvious to anyone who belongs to the group being studied.

I'm in the group and I don't think the specific explanation is obviously true. But I also think that any particular individual in the group may be part of a _particular_ gay community which isn't necessarily representative of all gay men.

I think one could even have reasonably guessed that the opposite effect would dominate; if gay men on average have somewhat less support from their families, both because of actual homophobia, and just because they on average have more older brothers, that it might be harder for them to get to college.

Aside from the "best little boy in the world" hypothesis of overcompensating achievement, I think another one which rings true anecdotally is gay men realizing that they have to find a way to move out of whatever community they were raised in to find an environment which is less repressive or confining.

> I always find it fascinating when extremely well-respected university folks make write-ups that confirm what is dead obvious to anyone who belongs to the group being studied.

Is it? I'm a member of said group, but I always kind of assumed (without thinking about it too much) that the effect came largely from the fact that college is one of the easier places and contexts to come out.

These data are fascinating, but I would've liked more of the socioeconomic skew. I grew up in lower middle class area, and I can recall many gay men that didn't pursue academics beyond high school. They mostly went on to service industry jobs. Even after I graduated, the gay men I met after college at bar environments mostly worked unskilled jobs, and due to my location, many were current/former military. It could be that gays from better off backgrounds have a slightly higher propensity to complete college.

That's interesting. Anecdotally, I'm a gay guy from a working class town, and I'm one of only a few gay guys that ended up getting any sort of degree. My cousin is gay and he went into the Air Force, the rest of the gay guys I know of from my old hometown (all people I learned were gay later, being openly gay was not a safe thing there when I was in high school, but became less of an issue in the decade afterwards), all work at places like Dollar General or Family Dollar stocking shelves. I'm also the only guy from my graduating class to have gone to college at all, as opposed to three girls from my graduating class and a fourth whose gone to college in the years after. I wonder if other people's anecdotal observations match our own?

> Roughly 52 percent of gay men in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree, while the overall national number for all adults in the U.S. is 36 percent.

Or, maybe, uneducated gay men face more pressure to not out themselves.

If you are uneducated it is very likely your male friends will also be uneducated and probably not very receptive to you being gay.

On the other hand being educated means you are likely less dependent on others that might turn you down, you have more educated friends who will be more likely to respond positively and you work in places which will cause less problem to you if you are found to be gay.

>Or, maybe, uneducated gay men face more pressure to not out themselves.

Or maybe they realize that blue collar jobs are harder (for the most part) to exist in as a gay person than white collar jobs.

There're all sorts of possibilities here.

I think there's a sort of epistemological or at least methodological question here. The article states a top-level finding (gay men get degrees more often), and brings up a hypothesis rooted in individual experience (a memoir where academic achievement is way to compensate for difficulties in measuring up to standards of masculinity or parental expectations).

But how do we ever validate that such a subjective individual-oriented hypothesis is explanatory for the group trend as a whole?

Though the "best little boy in the world" hypothesis sounds plausible and aligns with some anecdotes, it's probably not alone. E.g. different individualized explanations might be:

- college is a socially valuable ticket towards mobility that lets gay men find their communities, possibly relocating.

- the particular othering experienced by gender non-conforming boys encourages introspective habits of mind which are later useful.

It's not the kind of thing where one could feasibly use experiments to validate or refute a hypothesis ("we raised group A in an environment of homophobia and toxic masculinity ..."). And even in terms of data collection, it seems impossible to meaningfully dial in to a finer grained level of detail on a broad population. It would seem a bit preposterous and even callous to put on a survey "on a scale of 1 to 7, do you agree with the statement 'As a child I felt that masculinity was inaccessible'?"

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by specific majors, and a breakdown by the size of the school (and a breakdown by both major and the size of that major at each person's school).

My first guess would be that this would be more pronounced in majors where the male/female ratio is higher, if the size of the major is above some threshold, due to a fundamental difference between gay dating and straight dating within a population.

Opportunities for straight males to date within a straight population depend on the male/female ratio. A necessary condition for every straight male in that population to have a girlfriend in that population is that the male/female ratio be <= 1:1.

For every gay male in a population to have a boyfriend within that population the only necessary condition is that there be an even number of gay males in the population.

Consider two students in a major that is heavily male, one gay and one straight. The straight student is very likely to have to date someone outside the major. If the major is large enough to have several gay students then the gay students have a much better chance than the straight students of dating within the major.

I'd expect having your boyfriend/girlfriend in the same major could help academically, and so being more likely to be able to have a boyfriend in the major gives gays some advantage.

> Opportunities for straight males to date within a straight population depend on the male/female ratio. A necessary condition for every straight male in that population to have a girlfriend in that population is that the male/female ratio be <= 1:1.

> For every gay male in a population to have a boyfriend within that population the only necessary condition is that there be an even number of gay males in the population.

That is...a strange take on the kinetics of dating, if you will.

I'm just going to point out that bi/enby/fluid people are a thing, as are poly groups.

Also, online dating is a thing. Most of my (straight male) partners came from other schools, not because of the Male Ratio at my engineering school, but it was just more efficient to find someone with a matching personality online, and sampling from a larger region.

How did they support their ""Best Little Boy in the World"" hypothesis? Or is it just a handwavy "discrimination something something"? Why does it not work equally for lesbians, if that is the cause?

Another hypothesis (which I made up on the spot): educated gay men are more likely to come out as gay than uneducated men, so their sample is biased. Same question of course why does it not apply equally to lesbians. Perhaps lesbians face less of a stigma or whatever.

> First, women's rising academic advantages are largely confined to straight women. Although lesbian women historically outpaced straight women, in contemporary cohorts, lesbian and bisexual women face significant academic disadvantages.

> Unlike gay boys, contemporary lesbian girls face a number of academic disadvantages. For example, Mittleman's data indicate that, compared to straight girls, lesbians are twice as likely to report ever dropping out of high school. These stark disadvantages, he suggests, could reflect discriminatory treatment from teachers.

The discrimination against wlw in High School was/is really really real. It genuinely wasn’t until 2015ish that public perception changed from lesbians being “dykes preying on our daughters” to “dawww two girls dating.”

Sure, but fi the discrimination against lesbians also exists, why is there no "best little girl in the world" effect as they claim for gays?

Colleges try very, very hard to be “safe spaces” for LGBTQ folks.

If you’re in a strongly anti-gay family and community, getting good grades is a way out of state and in to a place with an active LGBTQ group on campus.

There've been several studies indicating just perceiving women has a negative effect on heterosexual male academic performance. Until now I assumed men had the same effect on homosexual males. Perhaps that isn't the case?

Citation needed? I would love to see what controls are involved in this since my own personal research has shown "Misogynists love to blame women for their problems" pretty consistently.

The call for a citation is warranted, and, if the data supports the claim, I'm curious whether the same applies to homosexual males and if there is a significant difference between closeted and out homosexual males.

However, it does not follow that someone pointing out a biological reality (if it is, indeed, the reality) automatically blames women for their own sub-optimal performance and is therefore a misogynist. This is true, even if some misogynists use the exact same finding to do so.

A quick google turns this up:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232368611_Interacti...

and this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394231/

I recall also reading something similar regarding sexual imagery specifically, but I cannot immediately locate it.

I do think your immediate leap to "misogyny" is uncharitable and unfair. There's nothing inherently implausible or sexist about the hypothesis.

I fail to see how pointing out a way in which men react to women makes it in any way the fault of women.

Replicating dTal's citations:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232368611_Interacti...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394231/

I don’t believe gay men earn degrees at the highest rate in the US. American Hindus have a higher university degree rate.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/04/the-most-an...

I would bet that children of doctors or lawyers or engineers or those whose parents have more than $10M in assets earn degrees at an even higher rate than Hindus in the US. Seems neither here nor there.

a) The implicit comparison groups are the ones related to the qualifiers: gender, and sexuality

b) It doesn't make sense to compare categories that are not mutually exclusive, so since Hindus can be gay men it wouldn't make sense to have them as a comparison against gay men.

Many gay men feel that getting a professional job is the only way to live with a decent level of prosperity and safety. Straight men can take on manual labor, but jobs like construction and repair are so pervasively burdened with machismo and homophobia that working in those fields may be completely intolerable.

"this hypothesis proposes that gay men respond to societal homophobia by overcompensating in achievement-related domains..."

While it could be true, the obvious check on this would be to look at success in athletics. Do people who get an athletic scholarship, for example, turn out to be homosexual disproportionately often? Maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out not to be true. Athletics also offers well-defined methods of satisfying societal expectations, if that were the mechanism.

There s an implied causation in this correlation but it doesnt have to be either way and the data has no indication. If we accept that there's a certain level of sexual orientation fluidity, what if educated men tend to prefer to err on the gay side, and what would be the implications of this.

Also, as others said, it's easier to be "out" when your peers are MScs and PhDs , where the pressure to be progressive is higher

An explanation could be that they fit better into a feminised educational system, that is alienating and neglecting hetero boys.

I'm straight and disagree with your assertion that our educational system had become feminised to the point of "alienating and neglecting hetero boys". Curious to hear the basis for your opinion, though.

Of course they are the brighter guys.

There is a good reason Alan invented the Turing- and not the fruit-machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

I'd say this isn't because they are smarter or trying harder but because most gays don't tell in the open they are gays due to homophobia. Those who do, are socially better off than average in many ways that are also conductive to academic success.

What’s the ratio of gay men : straight men who have children?

What about gay:straight and are married?

Or if gay men who are married , in average, marry later in life than straight men?

These are questions. I don’t know stats on this.

It could be a matter of how much time one has to devote to graduate school.

Same-sex marriage wasn’t legal until just a few short years ago. Same-sex parenting (adoption, surrogacy, fostering) is still a legal minefield to the extent that it is now allowed.

So: interesting point - “time to devote to grad school” could have something to do with it. But I think it’s important to remember in that analysis that choosing to get an advanced degree rather than the alternatives you mentioned wasn’t necessarily a real choice at all, until very recently.

Maybe it's only gay men that feel comfortable coming out... Which are more likely gay men in highly educated social circles, since lower educated social circles are more hostile to homosexuality.

I.e.: correlation is not causality.

This is not surprising when you look at how it reflects in the corporate workforce and office culture, what people percieve as educated manners and polish, and notably, who is absent from it. It's less a factor in entrepreneurial/startup environments, but the upper levels of institutions, you can certainly see the selection representation, even if it could be construed as sexist or homophobic for noticing.

Entreprenuerial environments, as compared to regulated, institutional, government, NGO and arts, are still culturally different in their make up. The article tries to generalize some of LGBTQ peoples observed experiences, but I'd wonder if the key factor could be orientation to risk and how that gets rewarded. Education is a smart and very low risk strategy with reliably pretty-good rewards, and people who run institutions are rewarded more for avoiding risk than for taking it. What educated people dismiss as bro culture and have largely driven out of institutions is just unsupervised heterosexual masculinity, that is, without the burden of responsibility for others, accountability to taboos and public sphere narratives, or token positional authority. Participation or exclusion in that culture is not based on sexual orientation though even though I described it as heterosexual, it's an attitude and orientation to risk, conflict, identity, freedom, and even play. It's not like women and gay men somehow lack a banter and chirping gene, nobody would seriously believe that, so the absence of that risk orientation and gameness in offices is the effect of culture - which is an expression of the risk orientation of the people graduating universities.

I'd propose the educational effect and any emergent expressions of institutional preference and makup of their cultures for women and gay men is not an intrinsic feature of gender/sex, but a bias in favour of their orientation to risk and conflict, and this is the effect of more complex individual strategies. The skillset for trading in perceptions and navigating dynamic alliances is very different from that of gauging risk and conseqeunces (often called black and white thinking, transactional, etc.), and I'd ask whether risk orientation probably provides more predictive insight than sexual orientation does in this article.

It is interesting that they immediately drag out homophobia as a reason, when homophobia is practically nonexistent in academia and homosexuality is actively promoted.

There a so many practical reasons:

1) You have more time that students with a girlfriend.

2) You are spared many real life issues like pregnancy scares of gf etc.

3) You can always operate in the male thinking domain without attuning yourself to females.

4) Sex is way easier and costs less time to achieve.

5) You are out of the heterosexual male status games.

Historically, academic males have always been overachievers (there are so many of them in Cambridge/UK). The oppressed ones are in the lower classes (which the woke do not care about).

Add a bias in the study’s analysis, that it must be caused by bias against gays.

Being gay, I confirm people give a lot of support when they learn that you are. The most difficult is when people assume you are straight.

>when homophobia is practically nonexistent in academia

Like sexism isn't? I'd say that's quiiiiite a stretch.

And your reasons are all pretty flimsy? Gay men can have a partner/boyfriend? You still have to worry about STDs and have relationship issues. You still have to "attune" yourself to females in most fields? Casual sex is easier, but meaningful relationships (IMO as a bi man) are tougher to find. And just because you're gay doesn't mean you're out of heterosexual male status games... it's a heterosexual man's world and we're all just living in it.

> homosexuality is actively promoted.

Where? How?

> 1) You have more time that students with a girlfriend.

Gay people still date.

> 2) You are spared many real life issues like pregnancy scares of gf etc

I guess the issue gay people face aren’t real? STIs don’t exist? Rejection doesn’t happen? Homophobia in the world more broadly doesn’t exist?

> 3)

Of course because gay people don’t interact women at all. /s

I think everyone is aware that being gay is harder for those in lower classes.

> 3) You can always operate in the male thinking domain without attuning yourself to females.

What it this "male thinking domain" you are talking about?

Can you define it? Can you explain what is this attunement thing?

I'm genuinely curious. I've never heard about that before.

> when homophobia is practically nonexistent in academia

You are being... rather naive, or else hopelessly overoptimistic, here.

more like undereducated people often submit to peer pressure and thus less likely to identify as gay, while educated folks often found themselves in a much more supportive environment that they feel comfortable identifying as gay.

Did this study account for the fact that people are more likely to identify as gay if they come from more privileged backgrounds? If not, isn't that extremely stupid of the study? Or was there some ideological reason for the apparent stupidity?

obviously, they are not distracted by beautiful women.

People probably think this comment is sexist or something but I think somewhere over the course of the last 60 years of the feminist movement we started to completely ignore that humans are sexual beings and pubescent males have strong primal urges that absolutely will be amplified in the presence of women.

As I've gotten older I've come to realize that maybe there was a legitimate purpose behind thousands of years of gendered segregation, beyond some shallow explanation like sexism. How much potential do kids lose to chasing and fighting over women in schools/colleges? I'm not suggesting that it's a massive effect but I imagine its significant - and especially so in the military, where fraternization is basically impossible to avoid in coed deployments and can be toxic to morale.

> How much potential do kids lose to chasing and fighting over women in schools/colleges?

I notice you seem to have jumped from "kids" to basically straight male kids.

In times and places when gender-based segregation was the norm, how much potential was lost when women and girls were either excluded from schools or shunted to lesser schools with a reduced curriculum?

>I notice you seem to have jumped from "kids" to basically straight male kids.

Well, yes, because men are more influenced by hormones to actively pursue women who passively choose suitors, like virtually any other sexually dimorphic species. And straight males make up easily 90%+ of the male population, so I don't know why you've even added that qualifier?

>In times and places when gender-based segregation was the norm, how much potential was lost when women and girls were either excluded from schools or shunted to lesser schools with a reduced curriculum?

That's not an argument against gendered segregation.

> That's not an argument against gendered segregation.

It absolutely is. Gender-based segregation a long history and a terrible track record. You're fixated on what men "lose" by being in an integrated context. The loss to society overall has to account for the other half of the population whose potential and access to education was stifled under that system.

How gender-based segregation performed when used is absolutely the appropriate measure of how harmful it is. Some archconservative will always be able to invent some new ad-hoc criteria and say "we haven't tried my specific new framing of segregation; this time I totally promise can make separate but equal equal. You should totally ignore the centuries of history where we tried this and squandered the intellectual capacity of a large fraction of the population as being no longer relevant."

You did a good job demonstrating how the reification of social institutions works.

Do you think gay men aren't distracted by beautiful men?

Wouldn't they be distracted by, IDK, all the men they find attractive but frustratingly cannot be with because they're straight? Or the systemic oppression they face?

I mean you're responding to a sociological study with a one sentence quip, so IDK what I expected but what a bad take. I just...wow.

If it's only beautiful women that prohibit men from getting degrees, why don't attractive men distract the women? Why are only straight men unable to keep up

Why would anyone make a news article out of it?

There was once a time in America, when this was a marginalized group.

It wouldn't surprise me if that's part of it. Imagine growing up in a conservative rural working class family. For straight people, staying there and living a working class life could easily happen by default. But for a homosexual the educated city life seems more attractive.

Still is in rural America, which is a little less than half the population.

The numbers in this study aren't about recent grads either; the top-level figures include people that got their degrees decades ago, so it's like a survival-weighted integral over time.

Just 6 years ago they (we) were banned from marrying. And that was fixed by scotus, not democracy because plenty of people were more than happy with that situation.

Meanwhile, gay-bashing is still quite popular in rural areas. Are gay men overrepresented in places that aren't overtly dangerous to them?

Things like Matthew Shepard[1] were--and are--a thing in America. That was middle- or high-school or undergrad for some of us--times when we're exploring our sexuality and how to be in relationships.

Imagine wanting to be with someone of the same sex and then seeing news reports about a similar person being beaten to death for that reason. Imagine being immersed daily in negative language regarding homosexual relationships ("fag", "queer", "dyke", "fairy", "disgusting", "sin", "evil", "pedophile", etc.)--relationships you know you need, and which are put on a level with murder and pedophilia regularly.

The study may be flawed, and that itself might be noteworthy. If it's not, that, too is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard

That's absolutely devastating incident.

Actually, I read an article and it doesn't looks odd to me anymore. At first glance, it looked as too focused on someone's sexual orientation while totally ignoring personal traits of people. Now it's obvious that it's just a stats report. My bad.

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