Is LGBT equality economically beneficial for all?

Since the US Supreme Court decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized same-sex marriages in 2015) and more recently Bostock v. Clayton County (which prohibited workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity), the legal protections for LGBT people in America have never been stronger. And yet, in the same week that the Bostock decision was announced, the Trump administration finalized a rule removing nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people in health care and health insurance. Clearly LGBT equality is not yet a reality in America, and it’s certainly not a reality in many other places around the world.

M. V. Lee Badgett is well suited to tackle the economics of LGBT equality. As a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she has spent her entire career researching LGBT issues and is one of the world’s leading economists in this area. In this book she compiles an impressive collection of evidence to argue that increasing LGBT equality improves economic outcomes not only for LGBT people but also for companies and entire countries.

Badgett summarizes how discrimination in schools, workplaces, and health-care systems negatively affects LGBT individuals’ education, wages, and health outcomes. She demonstrates how businesses that support LGBT rights—both for their employees and in society more broadly—are rewarded with lower costs (by retaining highly skilled workers) and higher profits (by attracting LGBT consumers). Finally, she aggregates and extrapolates data to estimate the effects of LGBT discrimination on country-level economic outcomes.