Pride and Prejudice: Affiliation with LGBTQ+ varies by profession and age groups
For Pride Month, Digital Planet investigates the degree to which the LGBTQ+ community finds solidarity among STEM fields. Analysis reveals the share of workers who express their identity as or affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community on their resumes is smaller among STEM graduates than college graduates overall. Women in STEM were twice as likely as men to profess an affiliation with the gay community on their resumes. Younger STEM candidates display a higher rate of LGBTQ+ affiliation than their older colleagues but still significantly trailed younger college graduates overall.
While the culture of discrimination and exclusion faced by women and minorities in the STEM fields has garnered increasing attention in recent years— as noted in our study last month — less researched are how differences in sexual orientation or gender identity harbor prejudice in STEM sectors. Still less understood is how LGBTQ+ identification intersects with gender and race to create distinct obstacles for different subgroups of this understudied community.
For Pride Month, Digital Planet investigates to what degree LGBTQ+ community finds solidarity among STEM fields.
With the help of the talent database of SeekOut, an AI-powered Talent 360 platform, we collated profiles of U.S. workers who used keywords such as LGBTQ, gay, lesbian, etc. in their online professional presence. This approach captures candidates who publicly list an affiliation with LGBTQ+ networking groups, sororities, fraternities, advocacy groups. While this approach does not capture every person identifying as LGBTQ+, it does provide insights as to who elects to publicly express LGBTQ+ affiliation in their online professional presence.
We found that the share of workers who expressed affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community on their resumes is smaller among STEM graduates than college graduates overall. While STEM graduates specializing in healthcare or pharmaceuticals were actually 11% more likely to affiliate with LGBTQ+ than those with at least a bachelor’s in any field, all other STEM graduates were only about a third as likely as college graduates overall to affiliate likewise.