Social/Religious Conservatism and the Propensity to Come Out

Details

Supervisors

Vandenberghe, Vincent

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This thesis relates to the emerging economic literature on discrimination towards LGBTQIA+ individuals. Conceptually, it capitalizes on Becker's preference-based approach to discrimination, in the sense that it assumes that, at its core, the phenomenon is rooted in people's views/preferences and reluctance to accept differences. But unlike in Becker's model, the focus is not on how people's biased preferences affect LGBTQIA+ individuals' labour-market outcomes, but on how they might affect their propensity to come out. Indeed, unlike race/ethnicity or gender, sexual orientation can be hidden. In what follows, using a simple individual decision-making model with costs and benefits, we propose analyzing the role of social preferences, particularly the role of social and religious conservatism in driving (limiting) the propensity to come out. To that end, we turn to rich European survey data where people reveal their sexual orientation, in particular whether they openly live in gay/lesbian couples (our proxy for coming out). We posit that the benefits of coming out are positive and relatively uniformly distributed. We exploit other items in the same survey where people disclose their religious/social conservatism and aggregate these answers to build geographical indices that we use as proxies for the (varying) cost of coming out. Using multivariate regression techniques, we then use these indices to quantify the role of conservatism in determining the propensity to come out.