“Just like race and gender, biases against individuals who identify as LGBTQ still exist in the workplace today."

LGBT tech workers earn less than their heterosexual coworkers, a new study reports.

According to the study out this week from San Francisco-based tech recruiting firm Hired, straight men earn significantly more than their queer counterparts, followed by LGBT men, heterosexual women and, finally, LGBT women, respectively.

The survey finds that heterosexual male tech workers earn an average salary of $120,412, while LGBT men in similar jobs earn nearly $3,000 less. Straight women reportedly make $7,879 less and queer women earn a whopping $10,901 less than straight men in tech.

Hired

Hired based its findings on data drawn from a mix of 120,000 job offers from 8,000 participating companies over the past year, as well as an optional, self-reported survey offered to the recruiting firm’s one million job seekers.

“Just like race and gender, biases against individuals who identify as LGBTQ still exist in the workplace today,” explained Jessica Kirkpatrick, a data scientist at Hired.

“When you combine LGBTQ bias, gender bias and any other bias, there is a compounding effect. That’s why women who identify as LGBTQ are ultimately paid less than other cohorts,” she continued. “We see that salary expectations follow the same trend, which is likely a result of candidates basing their salary requests off of what they are currently being paid, rather than what the market value is for their years of experience and skill set. This approach just perpetuates the wage gap.”

While the federal government continues to support active discrimination against LGBT employees in the workplace, queer workers gained a small victory yesterday when a federal appeals court in Chicago ruled that the Civil Rights Act includes a prohibition against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.