Next month, I am attending the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America to present my poster “Social-Institutional Structures That Matter: An Exploratory Analysis of Sexual/Gender Minority Status and Income in Japan.” This work is based on my MA thesis, and I am currently rewriting it for publication.
Title: Social-Institutional Structures That Matter: An Exploratory Analysis of Sexual/Gender Minority Status and Income in Japan
Abstract: While most previous studies examining the effects of sexual orientation on earnings rely on lesbian women, gay men, and their heterosexual counterparts in Western societies, this paper argues that focusing on different stratification processes within sexual/gender minorities as well as social-institutional structures of a society is indispensable to the study of sexuality stratification. Using the LGBT Workplace Environment Survey 2015, this study explores the association between sexual/gender minority status and income in Japan. The results show that there is a negative association between being a sexual/gender minority and income among both designated females at birth and designated males at birth. The results suggesting the lesbian premium found in Western economies are not observed in Japan. In addition, the findings indicate that the processes through which sexuality stratification operates depend on various categories of sexual/gender minorities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, and a local transgender category in Japan “X-gender.”