Queer Earnings: What Same-Sex Couples Reveal About Gender, Income, and Partnership

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 18. Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

Same-sex couples pool the earnings of two men (male-male, MM) or two women (female-female, FF) into a single household. If outcomes simply reflected individual labor earnings, FF couples would earn roughly twice the average woman and MM couples roughly twice the average man. This paper tests how closely observed household income and wealth match those compositional predictions—and what accounts for the residual.
Using Luxembourg Wealth Study microdata (27 country-waves, 11 countries), we construct per-adult household disposable income and net worth alongside individual labor income, indexed to the opposite-sex male mean. OLS regressions decompose observed gaps into a gender-composition effect, a residual couple-type effect, a children effect, and couple-type × children interactions.
Three findings stand out. First, most of the raw MM income premium and FF income deficit is compositional: once gender composition is controlled, same-sex household incomes converge substantially toward opposite-sex levels. Second, a systematic FF wealth deficit persists even after accounting for gender composition and children—FF couples hold markedly less net worth than their individual earnings predict, most pronounced in the United States and Korea. Third, children generate income penalties for opposite-sex couples in several countries but produce larger, more volatile effects for same-sex couples where small samples limit precision.
The policy implications follow directly. If the FF wealth gap merely reflected the gender pay gap, wage policy would suffice. But a residual structural penalty points to differential access to wealth-building mechanisms—housing tenure, inheritance, employer pensions—requiring interventions that extend beyond labor market legislation to targeted asset-building programs. Cross-national variation in the FF wealth penalty further suggests that welfare state architecture shapes these outcomes in ways existing equalities law has yet to address.

Author

• Bela August Walker, CUNY-Graduate Center