A scholar from the University of California Los Angeles says the LGBT community has a long way to go to achieve legal equality. That’s despite the fact the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage this summer.
The University of South Dakota Law School held its annual Lavender Lecture this week. The event was hosted by OUT-Laws, a student group that brings discussion about LGBT issues,and Women in the Law.
Adam Romero is a lawyer from the nation’s only LGBT policy think tank. He has helped conduct multiple studies into LGBT discrimination, especially in work places. Romero says the data is quite staggering.
“We know from the data from the census on same-sex couples, is that men in same-sex couple tend to earn 20% less than men in different sex married couples. Interestingly though, lesbians or women in same-sex couples actually earn much, much less than women in different sex couples. So the national trend that I mentioned earlier actually doesn’t hold for South Dakota. Based on the census data, women in same sex couples earn something like 66% less than women in different sex married couples,” says Romero.
Romero says this data has been backed up by survey studies and resume experiments.