Research regarding education and sexual diversity has so far been restricted to the US, and the publication on educational mobility in the leading European social stratification journal will help establish the topic of sexual diversity and inequality in Europe. The research regarding changes in partnering and parenthood are the first of its kind globally and give a first picture of demographic change and the family lives of LGB people. This is important to understand many other facets of LGB people’s lives including well-being, social support and health.
The remainder of the project will push research further by continuing to document inequalities in more socioeconomic outcomes, such as earnings, and different facets of family lives. A final step will be to look at how contextual factors, most importantly policies, relate to socioeconomic and family outcomes of LGBTQ people. For instance, what is the impact of the retraction (2013) and subsequent reinstalment (2021) of subsidies for assisted reproduction on the likelihood to become parents among women in same-sex couples in Spain?
Another important part of the progress that we are making in the project is due to the increasing availability of data sources that allow studying gender identity as well as sexual identities beyond LGB. Most existing datasets only allow looking at the latter, but we are now also producing estimates for individuals identifying as, for instance, queer or asexual. One PhD student dedicates their thesis to studying how gender identity relates to socioeconomic and demographic outcomes. These advancements are important because these parts of the LGBTQ* population are particularly disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms. In addition, including gender diversity in quantitative sociology has implications for many other parts of the field too
