ABSTRACT
The rights and legal protections of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people have been at the center of heated debates in the United States. This chapter directly examines hiring discrimination against openly gay men and presents results from the first large-scale audit study of sexual orientation discrimination in the United States. The audit description includes signaling sexual orientation on a resume, the sample of jobs, and the variables used in regression analyses. The variables are: decisive, aggressive or assertive, and ambitious. The first contribution of the study of racial discrimination is that it provides more direct evidence for sexual orientation discrimination than do self-reports, small-scale experiments, and wage regressions. Employees' self-reports indicate subjective perceptions, which may not reflect the actual incidence of discrimination. The second contribution is that it identifies stereotyping as a potentially important mechanism underlying hiring discrimination against gay men.
