- Gay boys do better academically than their male and female peers; queer girls and women do worse.
- Historically, girls have performed better in school than boys, in aggregate.
- As queer students abandon traditional gender roles, their academic behavior changes.
Data about how LGBTQ+ students are doing in schools – both academically and socially – has, historically, been lacking.
One recent study looks to change that. Dr. Joel Mittleman, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, compared the academic performance of straight, gay, and bisexual students.
Using adult college completion rates and new data from 2009's High School Longitudinal Survey, Mittleman found that gay boys outpace their straight and bisexual male peers with respect to grade point averages and college degree attainment, and that women's rising academic advantages are largely exclusive to straight women, while lesbian women see a penalty.
Gay male students' collegiate success also connects to recent data about their household income, which has exceeded that of heterosexual and lesbian couples in recent years. Sexual orientation, Mittleman argues, reflects something more broadly about gender roles and how queer students abandoning some traditionally masculine or feminine traits might be linked to behavior and outcomes – namely, that girls typically do better in school than boys.
Queer people "do gender" differently, and that translates to breaking academic norms
Girls have done better than boys in the classroom "as long as we've had data on it," Mittleman says, with only societal constraints around higher education for women limiting their level of academic attainment. In contrast, men's academic attainment has been stagnant, with men born after 1980 only slightly more likely to have a bachelor's degree than men born before 1950.
But not where queer students are concerned.
Across all racial groups, gay men found high levels of educational attainment, surpassing not just straight men, but also straight women. Research shows that boys who do well in school are often the target of homophobic bullying, which might dissuade male students from working hard. Gay boys, Mittleman argues, by virtue of their sexuality, already feel a distance from traditional masculinity, and are therefore encouraged to pursue academic success.
"Compared to straight boys from the same high school, gay boys were much more likely to report that they felt unsafe in school and that discrimination had negatively impacted their educational opportunities," he told Insider. "What my study shows is that, despite these challenges, gay men demonstrate a rather remarkable academic resilience."
Men in same-gender relationships earn more than both their female counterparts and heterosexual couples, recent data shows, and in spite of historical workplace discrimination, queer men have been earning about 10% more than straight men with similar education and experience since 2010.
These findings about gay men's high college attainment offers some clue to why, other than the wage gap between men and women. College grads still earn more than workers with no university degree, and this body of research shows that gay men are more likely to graduate college.
"The good girl role" is complicated for queer Black and brown girls
For girls, the relationship between academic success and femininity is reversed. A key component of girls' success in classrooms is adherence to the "good girl role," Mittleman writes, which is reflected in modest attire and deference in behavior to teachers.
Queer girls reported lower GPAs than straight girls overall in surveys, with bisexual girls averaging a 2.53 out of 4, and gay girls averaging 2.44. Straight girls had a 2.82 on average.
The image of the "good girl" is complex, however, often associated with being white, and middle-class, according to researchers. That might be why queer white women report high levels of academic attainment, while Black lesbians have been "clearly excluded from the educational advantages that historically accrued to white lesbians," Mittleman says, which skews queer women's academic attainment as a whole.
That's reflected by their degree attainment: 3 out of 3 surveys showed gay Black women scoring fewer college degrees than their straight peers, with 2 out of 3 showing the same for Asian women. Gay white women saw higher degree attainment than their straight peers and peers of color by far.
In the same way that straight male students shy away from academic achievement because of its association with femininity, queer girls also avoid it. "To the extent that teachers see LGB girls as enacting masculinity, this could make them prime targets for the 'bad girl' penalty," Mittleman says.
"This risk could be especially high for Black girls, who are already stereotyped as masculine by white authority figures," Mittleman writes, also noting that discipline rates between straight and queer white girls were virtually the same.
As for bisexual students, Mittleman said, the results are less clear-cut, achieving only slightly more college degrees than their straight peers, for instance, but also attaining slightly fewer high school diplomas than straight and gay students on average. Mittleman's guess is that bisexual youth grapple with both the confines of gender that their straight peers face and the rejection of it that their gay ones do.
What's sure, he says, is that students' academic behavior is largely a product of their environment.
"The gender gap, sociologists show, is not an immutable fact of biology," he said. "It is a contingent product of students' social positions and social contexts."