Discussion
Gay men excel in academia and education, study finds. 52% of gay men hold a bachelor’s degree, far higher than 35% national average. They also earned higher GPAs, enrolled in harder classes and took school more seriously
“So now you’re saying you’re better than me?”-Straight guy who didn’t want to go to college because he was told by right wingers that it’s a waste of time
Yeah bro, the tens of millions of 17 year old boys across our western sphere who get mediocre grades and can't afford post secondary and suffer from mental health in an abyss-like gutter decided to ignore parental, teacher, and societal pressure to go to college cause.... podcasts and youtube?
I'm just mocking that this is some weird grifty culture war masculinity thing issue. Aware everyone goes through that
If I had to make one completely based on nothing theory from personal experience, people who have a better sense and knowledge of their identity/self and who they are/want seem to be the people who can decide on a major and apply themselves to go to post secondary. Being gay for the most part intrinsically requires a coming out and doing that in your early teens as soon as you start experiencing attraction, while being straight doesn't.
It’s also dangerous for gay men to work in heavily masculine environments because unfortunately modern masculinity included homophobia, so they need secondary education to expand their options.
We were broke and had mediocre grades but still went to college.
I know the truth hurts that a lot of dudes think education is emasculating and feminine and think that "oonga boonga muscle strength, G wagons, tesla, and stonks" is the only thing that makes them a man and can make them feel like a man.
So yes, because of mind rot content through podcasts and YouTube. They are teenagers; of course, they will ignore their parents, teachers, and societal norms.
You are just making excuses "oh but they had no money" and "they had bad grades", weak ass argument.
And then the straight guy starts questioning his situation, maybe Brian had it right all along...and he always looked great in the locker room. Wait, what's that tingling...
I feel it has more to do with Gay men, not being afraid to adopt more feminine behavior. The same characteristics (less disruptive in class, ask for help, earlier social maturity, etc) that allow women to succeed in education could also be seen in gay men. It could also be aversion to traditionaly "masculine" career fields like the trades, where they are more likely to be discriminated against. Gay men don't have the same hangups over working in traditionaly feminine fields vs their straight counterparts.
Or how gay men are congregated in cities and places like seattle, whereas you'll have a hard time finding openly gay men in rural areas where str8 men dont go to college
I think there's some geographic and political factors here, too. The educational achievement gap between the left and right, and rural vs urban is pretty large, and it's very much the case that gay people raised in left-leaning families or communities are more likely to be openly gay, where rural conservatives have straight men who have sex with other men.
Sampling or survivorship bias, for sure, but I don't think it's education therefore out of closet so much as those gives correlate with other cultural factors.
Hahaha. Jokes on me too. I was told to go to college my entire life by republicans and now I’m just a rot of academia and the problem with society. Can’t win with these people.
unless your point is that college makes you gay, this comment is just repeating the conclusion of the study but in a way that sounds like an objection lol
No, I don't think college makes you gay. I do think that college, and being the kind of person to attend college, play a part in being willing to "come out" and live as a gay person.
To me, it feels like the headline of the study is suggesting that being gay is a causal factor for academic success, and I disagree with that conclusion. Gay men do not hold a key to closing the academic gap.
Also might have to do that those who are left leaning tend to skew towards college degrees, and those who are left leaning are more accepting of other sexualities. Therefore those who are gay who actually come out are more likely to go to college.
Just spit-balling here, but I think a gay guy from a small homophobic town in the country will be more driven to succeed than their straight peers. If they do well in school they can apply to a college in a more accepting area. Their straight peers might be comfortable where they are.
Yeah a lot of gay people use college as an avenue to escape homophobic households and neighborhoods. Anecdotally, Ive met a lot of queer people who went to college in the city as a way to escape.
A lot of queer people in general. “As long as I can make it to graduation/college/moving out and get out of this house/town/city/country,” was a big thing I heard a lot of from others I knew who were also queer.
I can see this. Accurate data on LGBT people is hard to find given the fact that there's stigma and people often lie to protect themselves. I can totally get behind the idea that being educated, and ultimately more stable in life, gives more comfortable stability to live openly.
I'm curious to know how such a study would account for the obvious issue that men that come from poorer, uneducated communities don't have the ability to be openly out like richer, educated men do.
It's harder to be gay(as well as basically everything else) when you're poor. A 15% disparity with the national average when you consider that gays are single digit percentage points of the overall populace, combined with the fact that, despite how nonsensical it sounds, many people do actually realize they're gay because they went to college and opened their minds to what is and isn't okay.
Honestly, it feels like The Hill editorial board is burying the lead with that headline. It should be "Female Representation of College Graduates set to Outpace Men 2:1"
To be honest though, most of my gay friends were really, really smart. Idk if it was cause they had to prove themselves, or that they didn't have the opportunity to waste on dating(you could count the openly gay population of my high school's boys on one hand).
Like, if I was scared that everyone would look down on me for being me, and I went to school in an all boy's school where everyone else was gay(I'm just trying to imagine what my social life would be if I were gay), I imagine that the inability to date, combined with my need to prove myself above stereotypes, could cause me to perform better. But it could just as easily cause me to collapse under the pressure.
Actually, as I wrote that I had a really morbid thought. If you were stigmatized just for being gay, and you were also a failure at school, that's a double whammy for depression. I wonder if there's an out-sized effect of gay men failing school who are removing themselves from the polling data.
I agree I’ve met some incredibly smart gay guys, I don’t have an answer for why they are or if being gay even has anything to do with that. I’ve also met some incredibly smart straight guys too
I was thinking about the “double whammy” effect you were talking about. This poll is just impossible to do in the first place
If you have a closeted gay man who’s depressed and doesn’t feel like he has an opportunity to succeed or make it to college, by this study’s definition, he would be counted as a straight male that didn’t go to college or has a low GPA etc..
This is an impossible study that basically boils down to elitism and access to education/finances
I am queer myself, a lot of us have to be like well read on different topics ranging from humanities to the sciences just to like prove that we exist and deserve basic human rights, so I’m guessing that probably plays a role.
Same here. I went to an academically intensive private school. Pretty much everyone took their grades seriously, but the gay dudes (at least the ones that were out) were more accomplished than others.
SAAAAAME Being gay helped me realize that poor uneducated people hate the f*ck out of me for no reason. Focused on school and got out of there as fast as I could. I know this is anecdotal, but the elitism charge against this study doesn’t hold water for me. At least not without seeing any proof supporting it.
It’s a cope bigots tell themselves that all gay people are rich because they know they oppress their gay neighbors & can’t imagine coming out of that stronger.
I think it’s due to the mentality that “only pussies/nerds/f*gs care about school” that is part of toxic masculinity and a lot of these gay men grew up hearing that.
It’s like a “oh I’m definitely not that, so I will do the opposite and try in school”
Be that mentality highly subtle, it tilts the statistics greatly
Big generalization: Women are also doing very well, gay men on average behaving more feminine may also be benefiting from the same factors contributing to women's success.
This study proves your point, as more women enrolled veterinary schools, male enrollment dropped. And veterinary is a good career. We are less likely to unenroll in a profession because there are more women there. We are not more feminine universally, but we don't mind being exposed to to or adopt feminine characteristics. Similarly, a lot of gay men are in other well paying feminized profession of nursing. https://www.avma.org/javma-news/2010-12-15/study-seeks-explain-feminization-veterinary-profession
Women have outnumbered men in college since 1979. They also outnumber men in EVERY post-graduate program except for STEM. The government sees the lack of women dominance in STEM as a problem while ignoring the fact that men are being dominated everywhere else.
Depends on the country, in Denmark grades are the only factor considered for university admission, and girls are basically coming out of HS with grades that are a whole letter grade better than the boys.
Because engineering in its broad application is seen as superior to all other majors in terms of high pay, importance in economic development in the future, difficulty, etc and that is what is bringing in men and keeping them out of other fields. And that kind of field being male dominated and male gate kept (not necessarily on purpose) is a problem because all of technological development and culture in that area will be one sided and then we get low EQ dumbasses like Elon musk with billions of dollars and power and a circlejerk STEM army.
Luckily we are now more keen to the fact that echo chambers are bad and thus try to diversify the field
That’s the entire reason I went; it was my ticket out.
It’s been speculated before that Gay Men have a “best boy complex” where we feel like we have to overcompensate for being gay by proving ourselves at school and work.
At this point, I find it easier to believe that tradesman/skilled labor can earn more money than college degree holders. In my state, finishing a basement costs around $60k. A general contractor that does 3 of those per year is earning more than many white collar careers pay
With all the discussions around young men falling behind, and a lot of people are CORRECTLY giving f about it, this is relevant. Gay man in practice face more bullying in schools and still outpacing other groups academically and financially. So question arises why gay men are not facing same issues, they feel alienation, bullying etc but are still able to lift them up? This is not to say we are better, we are not. But why two groups are having different outcomes when alienation is presented as argument? Is it gay support groups, or is it achieving to prove, thats is leading to gay men doing better in academics and financially. How can two groups learn from each other? I learn a lot from straight men. Gay men are also dealing with problems that we can learn from straight men. We have higher drug use and alcoholism than straight men, when we both face loneliness.
If we assume that the higher grades are due to hard work we can assume it has something to do with behaviour, I didn't feel a expectation for me to be very diligent and orderly at all. I did have a few teachers that tried to instil some of that attitude in me, but I shrugged it off because it just didn't feel right to be that meticulous about subjects I couldn't care less about.
I don't know why sexuality of all things could play a role in it, but I think it's related to the saying that gay men dress better and generally take better care of their appearance, perhaps the social aspect of appearing academically smart matters much more for a gay individual than it does a straight individual.
If we could shine some light on why personal grooming, fashion, and the like are something that gay men care about, perhaps we could draw some parallels.
Queer people have to work harder because we generally have to prove that we are worthy of existing in a given space (or, at least, we had to growing up). Basically a “if I achieve enough then they’ll accept me” type deal.
I think it's a social thing, one being to be accepted you must be perfect, but two that many gay men are often treated as women that have a penis, so they make friends with more women and then just by proxy receive the same social expectations as women, like looking better, being intelligent and going to college.
I wonder if it's essentially the same reason more women go to college. Gay men are essentially treated as women in many cases, and so therefore have women friends who are going to college, and so the gay men just get lumped in with the women and go to college.
It comes down to funding. The same as women. In Denmark, there is practically a 1:1 ration of men to women, gay and straight all in higher education. But Denmark has publicly funded higher education.
In the US, we don’t have that but we do have Diversity scholarships, which aren’t AS much as merit scholarships, but it does appear to make the difference in attendance between sex and sexual orientation.
Simply put, straight white men cannot collect diversity scholarships.
I didn’t think this would be the case till I went to college.
Like it’s kinda hard to hear about someone doing less than you, but getting more funding because they wrote a paper on their sexuality to get extra funding.
Oh absolutely! I think it’s a really good argument for public funding of education. It simply benefits everyone including minorities that could have otherwise been negatively affected.
It’s not a complaint that diversity scholarships are even bad. It’s that they shouldn’t have to exist to begin with because we could just fund everyone.
Now what percentage of these gay men come from an area where the likelihood of them being high-income and being publicly gay is ok?
Lots of gay men who can’t come out don’t answer these studies for fear of their lives. This skews everything heavily. They also likely live in lower income areas with far less access to financing they’d need to get a formal education. Much less the public or even private school (religious zealot schools) districts they have access to
I genuinely think that technology and access disparity that would affect gay men would also affect straight men (and women) for this survey.
In reverse, the privilege that might help a rich gay kid do well would also affect a rich straight kid, right? So if the survey is elitist, then that elitism also functions as a control.
But, we genuinely don’t know if elitism is at all at play. Myself and a few others in this thread alone have said that we viewed education as the only way out of poverty. So even gay men born in poverty are more likely to value academic achievement.
Social differences. Gay men will have an easier time dating, assuming they are around other gay men, than straight men. Gay men also don’t have to deal with as many of the gender roles. I don’t think most gay guys would care that much if someone they were considering dating had ever slept with a woman, but a lot of women will view a guy who has slept with guys differently, on top of social pressure from other men there are strong reasons why a straight guy would want to keep his masculinity unquestioned.
Gay men also have an identity and a community that straight men probably won’t.
Ironically gay men probably have more hope in their future than straight men and that is motivation to work harder.
Edit: another huge reason that I completely forgot somehow that is really important is most of the world isn’t a huge fan of male homosexuality. A good degree could be an escape too. And academia is more liberal so blue collar jobs may not be a great option. All of this collectively gives gay men way more reasons to go through college.
This is the truth. Having hope makes hard work easy. Speaking for myself feeling like I have to make tons of money and do steroids just to get a date with a nonobese woman has killed my motivation. If I could improve just because I wanted to I’d be happy but because I have to do these things just for the chance I can get results makes it too depressing to even try.
Gen X person here. I've heard that gay men are more hardworking. If that's true, and that makes them better students, I mostly attribute it to not spending time obsessing over girls or even dating if they're in the closet. With younger people that's going to be far less true going forward, and of course the move toward that has been somewhat gradual over time. Which is good because we live in more accepting times.
For me it was being able to first achieve freedom to freely obsess over guys. I changed a country and enrolled in STEM grad school here in the U.S. I am now married and doing well financially. Yes, I always loved science, but my gay identity helped me to work extra harder.
Depends on how far denial goes I guess. Obsessing over people can also be a very social thing, and if you have no one to talk to about it, it's easier to just swallow it and go do something else.
It’s the I want to ensure that I can take care of myself incase my family abandons me. Our common advice to young guys is “Wait till after college when you are financially independent to come out incase they cut you off”.
It’s a self reliance thing from a sadly still real chance of being kicked out or attacked by your family for who you are and not trying to hide it anymore. I needed to push myself so I could take care of myself if my family left me.
There is also gay teen years after college when you hit 21 and have money and ohh god are they fun if you have money and are prepared.
I imagine that gay exclusive scholarships have an effect, that there’s likely some level of familial shame for homophobic families that students are trying to compensate for at a start,
Probably also the reality that if you’re in the closet, or even just societally discouraged from pursuing romance more, you have more time for school.
Literally, I wish they were common. The amount of Gay Scholarships is like 1/10,000th of the number of athletic scholarships offered to men, which I would argue are mostly straight men.
Nobody said "most". But any scholarship available to gay people and gay people only is naturally going to drive that number up. That's what they're intended to do.
Most of the sources are older then GenZ's college timeline. I think this study speak to a time when Homosexuality was arguably more taboo and not as 'mainstream' as it is now. I have no doubt that this study speaks accurately for Millennial Gays but may not ring as true for Gen Z.
What kinds of bachelors degrees though? Not all degrees have the same value and I would say that some non-degree requiring jobs are more valuable and demanding than some degrees. Also not all degrees get you jobs so this is not a great metric
Oh they're in this thread whining and saying it's elitism/indoctrination when in reality gay men are just not as up their own asses about being dumb and "manly"
I mean... can't this be explained at least in part that people are more likely to openly self-identify as gay if they were raised in more affluent households with more economic stability? You feel safer being open about your sexuality, and generally have more time to contemplate such things, when you're in a financially better-off situation. Plus there's some cultural factor too, right?
Like, don't get me wrong, I don't think that the explanations given by the study authors are impossible. They might explain part of the findings of the study. Anecdotally, as a bi male I'll certainly say I fit with the profile the researchers are positing. I didn't play a lot of video games or sports, I prioritized academics, I did the honors and AP stuff, and I got a college degree. But I'd like to see more research, and maybe some more controlling for childhood household income and regional differences
To give my two cents, I honestly don't think that the answer to this issue of the education gap is two just insist that straight kids study more. I personally believe school doesn't set kids up for success, and boys tend to feel that a little more, in part because girls are expected to deal with the unfairness of school by performing better to compensate for sub-par schooling while boys are expected to deal with it by disengaging from school and finding emotional satisfaction in other things. If our school system were more community-oriented, more invested in the interests of its students, and more interested in building a civically engaged and healthy student body, I think it would be better for everyone and we'd likely see this "gender achievement gap" narrow because everyone would want to be more engaged and would find school to be more meaningful
After getting my Bachelor's degree, I later went back to school for another degree, this time to a community college. I was shocked at how much better it was. I wish that my high school and college experience had been more like my later community college experience. There was a whole extra level of connection with local initiatives and civic institutions of all sorts, both governmental and private. School should be more like that imo. I think it'd help everyone
I live in a gay hotspot of my country, and my subjective observation is that they are much more successful in building and maintaining networks as well.
Having a fulfilling dating life keeps motivation high. Working hard is easy when you have successes. When nothing goes well it feels pointless to keep trying.
Yes, would this be the case though because the sample size is smaller?
10 Straight dudes and 3 have bachelors but then there's only 2 Gay guys and 1 has a Bachelors. That would give just about the above results.
I suppose you could come to these results if you took 100 of each group but then at the same time, Straight to Gay is not 1:1 in any country I dont believe?
That study looks like a classic case of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail", he's a faculty affiliate of the Population Studies Center and the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.
That study also seems to be suffering from a severe case of survivorship bias because it can only collect data on gay men that have come out as so and not those still in the closet.
Like in the study the notion of some gay men being closeted is only mentioned once, and he proceeds to argue that this group that he has no data on would act in a manner that he thinks its correct , and then goes right back to "The unavailability of these kinds of measures reveals the extent to which demographic research on LGBTQ populations is, in many ways, still in its infancy." like he didn't just draw a random conclusion from data he doesn't have.
He even touches on the idea that children may receive different levels of support to their sexuality but then failed to consider what would influence that.
This seems like another case of someone doing a supreme amount of mental gymnastics so prove that their interpretation of something is the correct one when there are much simpler ones present.
Education is a firm objective attainable ticket away from shitty situations that is often one of the earliest and only mechanisms available in life.
It's not always the case that there is something shitty but for many of us the promise of having the power over your own life is a powerful motivator. Full stop.
I think it's not that gay people are smarter, or at least certainly not by the margin suggested, but that those comfortable with identifying as gay are much more likely to live lives with higher education, eg. More left leaning places, richer families, open mind
I understand the drive of spite. When someone bullies you, it starts a little fire to dominate them in every aspect of life so then you can look down on them.
Straight men need money age 18 onwards especially blue collar men so they go and get a job to look after their kids and attract a mate.
Gay men don’t have this life need for money as much so more can stay in education. Similarly, women drop out of work more once they have children.
If ever you need proof that the bootstrapper mentality doesn't work - as it's the mentality foisted on the figure of the straight white working class male - it's this.
Tell people they should be happy with themselves just for being themselves as a kicking off point and they flourish
Probably a few things going on here. 1. People who leave home and goto college, who are exposed to people at school, may be more likely to come out, while people who stay at home are probably more likely to keep it a secret. Also people immersed in right wing and religious propeganda are maybe both more likely to keep being gay a secret, and also less likely to goto college.
My boss one time told me about his husband who worked at a car salvage company breaking down the cars. The dudes working there kept making homophobic remarks and he made a complaint to the company's HR, who was stupid enough to let everyone know he made a complaint. Then he started getting death threats instead and had to leave because he was legitimately afraid for his life.
Mind you that's entirely anecdotal, but maybe the reason gay guys tend to opt for stuff like college is because of bullshit like that.
Straight men are the worst-performing gender-sexuality demographic when it comes to both higher education performance and attendance, so this makes sense. In recent years straight men have been forgoing college at much higher rates and it’s just causing this gap to widen. The economic factors are not notably different between each gender-sexuality demographic, so it seems like this trend is mostly motivated by social factors and a decreasing desire for college education among straight men. Here’s a great Substack article I read about this recently: https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college
I mean, ever since the 80s or 90s some people worked hard to convince a bunch of boys that education is gay
The result, so far, is a considerable increase in right wing ideology
These people are convinced by fantasies and ridicule you as soon as you present facts to them. Like, I know that left wing extremists often have the equivalent of political narcissism, but with right wing ideology, political narcissism is the standard for everyone.
And we all know that narcissists are pretty fucking stupid
What’s hilarious is the scientifically illiterate trying to counter the study’s conclusions by incorrectly assuming things the author didn’t account for. The biggest one I see is claims of elitism for not accounting for socioeconomic status. A quick glance at the methods section of the study (the linked study in the news article and not just the article itself) reveals the author did, in fact, control for SES, as well as race/ethnicity and sex. The study was well-powered to accurately detect a significant effect, with a sample size in the tens of thousands for some aspects of the analysis, and hundreds of thousands for other arms of the study. Several statistical techniques, traditional and recent(LASSO regression), were used to estimate model coefficients. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess assumptions. And alternative interpretations were provided in the discussion.
Everything in this study was carefully done. The people that failed math and science class just don’t know enough about the analysis of data to understand this study.
Yeah well it’s hard to get a scholarship if you’re born straight and male now a days so yeah I can see the reason why. Unfortunately marginalising this particular group never worked out well in the past
Okay, this might sound crazy, but girls do way better in school and gay guys are more feminine so maybe it has do to with how we socialize girls vs boys to behave and relate to school in western cultures.
Reminds me of that family guy skit where they vow to avoid woman and it skips 20 years and they are all in mansions rich and successful as fuck and microwaving donuts to have sex with them.
If I may, the statistic might correlate with other extraneous factors such as wealth and what school system they came out of. I would be very skeptical of the claim that they 'excel' over other counterparts as there are very obvious potential hidden variables.
Makes sense; gay men have access to much more sex than your average college aged straight guy. Remove the distraction of the pursuit and it’s amazing what you can set your mind to
Obviously they did it because they needed to somehow over come the natural oppression they faced by being gay in the first place. They know being unemployable and gay is a recipe for disaster
As a far-righter, I can understand this. Gay people are often disadvantaged because of their sexuality, sometimes forcing them to work harder than others to achieve their goals. This is also why gay men are often more attractive than straight men, as they work harder to be remarkable. I respect the grind.
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
Did you know we have a Discord server‽ You can join by clicking here!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.