A paper published in the American Sociological Review on Feb. 20 concludes that gay men excel academically as opposed to their straight counterparts, NBC News noted.
Joel Mittlemana University of Notre Dame sociologist and the paper's sole author found that on an array of academic measures, gay males outperform all other groups on average, across all major racial groups. Conversely, he concluded that lesbians perform more poorly in school overall and that Black gay women have a much lower college graduation rate than their white counterparts.
Mittleman was able to reach his striking research findings thanks to a move during President Barack Obama's second term to add questions about sexual orientation to a trio of federally funded, nationally representative surveys.
Among other things, the report stated that about 6 percent of gay men have a Ph.D., J.D. or M.D.a rate 50 percent higher than that of straight men. Mittleman found that gay men's considerably higher levels of educational attainment hold even after taking into account differences in men's race and birth cohorts.
The U.S. lesbian population's overall college graduation rate, which ranged between 41 percent and 47 percent in the three survey studies, is significantly higher than that of straight women. But Mittleman found this advantage was limited almost entirely to white lesbians, and among women born more recently, gay women's educational edge has eroded.
The full article about the report is at www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/straight-men-face-educational-crisis-gay-men-excel-academically-study-rcna18018. An abstract of Mittleman's findings is at journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00031224221075776 .