Can we use data to study the LGBTQ* population?
LGBTQ* people face numerous barriers and challenges to achieve their objectives in life. Such barries include discrimination, stigma and so-called minority stress: Stress that is specifically related to the experiences of a minoritized group. For instance, walking hand-in-hand with a partner on the street is often a more stressful experience for LGBTQ* people than for heterosexual people. Another example can be that LGBTQ* people who would like to become parents encounter extra challenges because public services are often designed for the presence of only two parents: one woman and one man. Minority stress, discrimination and stigma therewith make it harder for LGTBQ* people to achieve goals in life that can range from just being happy, to having a nice job or becoming a parent.
One way of understanding the impact of these challenges is to translate the opportunities LGBTQ* people have into numbers and compare them to the opportunties of heterosexual people. Such a “quantification” is an important step towards understanding whether and how contextual differences in policies, attitudes and discrimination impact the chances of LGBTQ* people to achieve goals in life. Combined with more qualitative investigations that map the lives of LGBTQ* people, such quantitative studies could help us think about and design better ways to organize our societies.
This website is part of the MINEQ-project which takes on the challenge of studying the opportunities of the LGBTQ* population using quantitative data. This is not a straightforward task as there are problems that are inherently related to studying this topic quantitatively. These problems include limited data availability and the need to categorize sexual and gender identities. On this website, we would like to share some of our findings and also to provide some tools for other researchers who are interested in taking a similar approach. Below you can click your way towards these different resources that include an introduction to key concepts, an overview of papers that can help interested researchers get familiar with the topic, and links towards papers that have been published within the framework of the MINEQ-project.
Concepts of Sexual and Gender Diversity
An Introduction to Academic Research
This project is financed by the European Research Council (ERC-2020-STG-948557-MINEQ)