In our sample lesbian women are less likely to own their home and are also less likely to live in socially rented housing (from a local council or housing association) than heterosexual women, but these finding are not significant so are not generalisable to the wider population. Due to recent welfare reform, and longer-term retrenchment in the UK, personal assets including housing have become more important to an individual’s welfare situation, so we are investigated both welfare access and asset ownership. We then compared a number of welfare outcomes between lesbian women and heterosexual women, and lesbian women and gay men. Key outcomes for heterosexual women, lesbian women and gay men Percent receiving investment income £500+ PA By contrast around 1% of the female sample identifies at lesbian and a further 2% identify as bisexual. Sexual OrientationĪs shown above, crosstabulation between sex and sexual orientation shows that about 2% of the male sample identifies as gay and a further 1% identify as bisexual. To maximise the sample size we combine waves 2011 through 2020 keeping only the most recent record per person. The data is from the Understanding Society an annual longitudinal household survey in the UK which has collected data on sexual orientation since 2011. An easy first-step for this is to focus on the experience of lesbians, who experience the compounding discrimination of being homosexual and women, and compare it to heterosexual women and gay men. In this project, we want to push intersectional analysis as far as the data will allow. This has been a problem for lesbians throughout the centuries of LGBT+ activism – the privilege of gay men means it is their voices and experiences that get heard and dominate analysis. Often LGBT+ data analysis just lumps LGBT+, or LGB, people together, ignoring the vast differences between them. It’s Lesbian Visibility Week so we thought we’d share some of our projects preliminary findings about welfare equality for lesbians.