Overview of Perceptions about Discrimination

LGBT respondents were asked generally if they had ever experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Hearteningly, 160 respondents, or 56%, responded that they definitely or probably had not. However, a quarter believed that they definitely or probably had, and an additional 20% (56 respondents) did not know if they had ever experienced discrimination (see table 4). This table reports responses to the question, asked only of self-identified LGBT respondents, “Have you ever experienced discrimination as a political scientist because you were bisexual, transgendered, gay or lesbian?”

Table 4. Discrimination

LGBT Scholars Climbing the Career Ladder

Table 5 displays responses to the question, “Have you ever experienced or witnessed a situation in which you believe a person's perceived homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgendered identity predominantly helped, hurt or was deemed irrelevant in the following circumstances?”Footnote ² The survey asked about a broad range of potential circumstances; here we report the responses of particular interest.

Table 5. Perceptions about Identity

While a few respondents identified issues as early as graduate school, over 90% either believed that LGBT identity was not relevant or did not know if it was; 3% of the respondents thought that LGBT identity helped in dissertation or thesis sponsorship and 4% thought it hurt. Nonetheless, a few respondents noted in open-ended questions that they had witnessed or experienced differential treatment, both negative and positive. For instance, one respondent explained, “One fellow graduate student left our department because they were discouraged from pursuing their research interests in this area for the listed reason. I tried to convince this student otherwise to no avail. I don't blame her for switching departments.” Another, however, notes, “I was lucky enough to have historians, sociologists, and theorists who are out LGBT scholars mentoring me along the way” during graduate school.

The survey raises more cause for concern as LGBT individuals begin their job searches. While 9% of respondents (183) believed that LGBT identity had benefited them or someone else, 11% (226 respondents) reported that this identification had hurt. While 39% claimed that they had never seen a situation in which LGBT identity was relevant in a job search, 40% did not know for sure if LGBT identity had played a role in the searches they had witnessed or experienced (see table 5). A few respondents noted in open-ended answers that some Catholic or evangelical institutions have signaled their unwillingness to hire LGBT faculty members. One respondent noted hearing about controversy after starting work: “I've heard similar accounts from different sources that my own hiring (in my ostensibly liberal, open, welcoming dept.) for a tenure track position was negatively influenced by my sexual orientation; in the end I did get the job because the first two candidates declined the position.” Another reported frankly, “I have never witnessed any of these things, but I do believe that it would be reasonable to consider a person's homosexual conduct or lifestyle (negatively) in hiring.” Some respondents insisted that sexual orientation and gender identity are largely irrelevant to professional opportunities and advancement: “I don't think there are significant problems for LGBT political scientists. I have never heard of decisions being influenced because of sexual orientation.” Others, however, claimed that LGBT status carries some cachet for some departments and universities.

Of the respondents, 139 (7%) claimed that they had witnessed or experienced an instance in which a person's perceived LGBT sexual orientation or identity had negatively affected that person's reappointment, tenuring, or promotion; 4% believed that orientation or identity had helped someone. While 43% claimed that orientation and identity had always been irrelevant factors in the personnel decisions they had witnessed or experienced, 46%, or 914 respondents, did not know for sure whether identity or orientation had ever played a role in an institution's choice to reappoint, tenure, or promote a faculty member (see table 5).

A heartening number of LGBT-identifying respondents (179, or 62%) reported that they did not believe their jobs would be endangered if their supervisors or chairs knew their identification as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. However, 8% (23 respondents) believed that their jobs would be in danger. Many respondents expressed uncertainty though—69 individuals (24%) felt that they were probably not at risk but could not say they were definitely safe, and an additional 6% did not know (see table 5).

Being Out in the Workplace

Related to this question, the survey asked LGBT individuals about the extent to which they are out in professional settings, asking respondents to check all categories that applied. Table 6 shows the responses. More than 60% of LGBT respondents reported being out in their professional lives.Footnote ³ One-third, however, were out only to some colleagues, and less than a quarter were out to senior administrators. Respondents reported different ways of being out, ranging from bringing same-sex partners to events to actively identifying themselves at their institutions as LGBT. One respondent, for instance, explained, “I was an out lesbian in my department with LGBT information posted on my office door (which apparently did cause some behind the scenes stir, I'm told).” Several bisexuals reported that being out was more complex for them: bisexual individuals in long-term monogamous relationships with members of the opposite sex are presumed to be straight. As one respondent noted, “I am bisexual but married to a person of the opposite sex, so many people assume I am straight.”

Table 6. Being Out

A few respondents pointed out that their identities as transgendered or transsexual also complicated the question of being out. One explained, “I am a female to male transgender person. That is not my sexual orientation, that is my gender/gender identity. I identify as male (that is how I am viewed in all circumstances). However, I also am gay, as in I have a male partner.” Unfortunately, the survey did not separate gender identity carefully enough from sexual orientation, so we cannot draw conclusions about how gender identity and sexual orientation function as a dynamic for transgendered or transsexual individuals who may identify as lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, or straights.

Collegiality and Benefits

Collegial relations are an important, if intangible, part of academic life. These encounters range from formal service together on committees and other departmental interactions and in the classroom to the informal social relationships that develop in many academic units among peers. Less than half of respondents, 42% (821 individuals), believed that academics' identification as LGB and/or T was irrelevant to how they interacted with their colleagues. An additional 88 respondents (4%) felt that LGBTs' collegial relations were better because of their status or identity. However, 16% (324 individuals) reported that they had experienced or witnessed worse collegial relations for LGBT individuals than for non-LGBT individuals, and an additional 37% reported uncertainty.

Informal collegial interactions often involve spouses, partners, and families. Sometimes these interactions go well for individuals with same-sex partners. One respondent wrote, “I had a partner (12 yrs)—she (and the information) was well received and with respect by faculty, students, colleagues. Having a partner actually makes it easier to be out, because spouses/partners come up in conversation. When I would mention my partner, sometimes students secretly came out to me.” Other respondents, however, reported that some colleagues do not treat their relationships as on par with relationships between opposite-sex couples. As one respondent explained, “Some colleagues treat us exactly like other ‘married’ (straight) people; others clearly think our relationship is something ‘less than’ their straight relationships.” Another noted that, while many colleagues were comfortable with the partnership, “Even ‘tolerant’ and non-homophobic colleagues, however, seem not to recognize the kinds of assumptions embedded in their assumptions about things like marriage (for example, that marriage signals real commitment, that kids are ‘better off ’ with married parents, etc).” Assumptions equating marriage with real commitment can have real consequences: “Informally, they try to be egalitarian. Formally and institutionally, they offer spousal hires to far more junior colleagues but not to my partner.”

The area in which the largest number of respondents saw negative effects was (unsurprisingly) in the benefits universities provide or subsidize. Although the survey was conducted before the disciplinary controversy over siting the APSA annual meeting in New Orleans, where Louisiana's anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendment denies state officials the authority to recognize committed same-sex partners in any way, this issue clearly resonated with respondents: 18% (346 respondents) reported experiencing or witnessing situations in which an individual's identification as LGB or T negatively affected that person's access to benefits, 4% (73 respondents) reported positive effects, and 38% saw status and gender identity as irrelevant. When asked about the most important issue facing LGBT members of the profession, 13.6% of the 876 respondents specifically criticized the lack of benefits for same-sex partners. In two other questions, 229 individuals asserted that a lack of domestic-partner benefits had influenced their decisions about positions, and 277 respondents reported taking the availability of benefits into account in making decisions about positions (see table 7).

Table 7. Benefits and Career Decisions

LGBT Issues and LGBT Scholars in the Classroom

Identity issues present themselves in complex and interesting ways in the college classroom. On one level, we can consider the identity of the instructor and how students interpret that identity. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not identical to other identity issues, due to the greater opportunities for conscious or unconscious “passing.” To what extent do students perceive their instructors to be lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered, and/or transsexual? Queer sexual orientations and gender identities may not be as visible to students as non-white racial status or femininity. The survey addressed instructors' beliefs about how their students perceive them, asking, “if you teach, whether you are straight or LGBT, do you believe that your students think they know your sexual orientation?”Footnote ⁴ (see table 8). While 21% did not know what their students thought about their sexual orientations, 66% believed that their students either knew from their signals or assumed that their instructors were straight or lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Only 7% of the respondents believed that their students did not peg them as either straight or LGB, either because the instructors were intentionally ambiguous or because they believed that students do not make assumptions.Footnote ⁵

Table 8. Students Out Instructors

In addition to making assumptions or reading cues delivered by their instructors, students apparently sometimes signal their own orientations and identities to their instructors. Eighty respondents (4%) said that students were out in all of their classes, and overall nearly 60% reported that students were out to them in at least some of their classes. Additionally, 22% said that students were not out to them and 19% claimed uncertainty. LGBT instructors reported more awareness of their students' orientations and gender identities than their straight colleagues. They also were more likely to report that students came out in each category. Still, more than half of straight instructors had out students in some of their classes. Further, the percentages of LGBT and straight instructors who reported not having any students reveal their orientations were relatively close (19.2% for LGBT instructors and 22.7% for straight instructors) (see table 9).

Table 9. Students Out Themselves

These issues raise related questions about the incorporation of LGBT topics in political science classes. To what extent are LGBT issues taught in political science classes, and when do political scientists think it is necessary or appropriate to do so?

Among the respondents, those who identified as LGBT were more likely to incorporate LGBT issues or topics in their teaching, with more than half doing so on occasion and less than a quarter reporting never addressing any LGBT issues. But many straights also incorporated LGBT content in their classes. Nearly 60% reported teaching LGBT issues and topics at least occasionally (see table 10).

Table 10. Teaching LGBT Issues and Topics

At what level are LGBT issues or topics incorporated in political science classes? The survey asked about incorporating LGBT issues into research and teaching in political science (research is discussed below). The question respondents answered was, “What is your assessment of how appropriate the following are in political science?” Respondents rated a variety of teaching scenarios and research generally as very appropriate, appropriate, not appropriate, or not familiar. While between 10% and 12% of respondents were uncertain about the appropriateness because of their unfamiliarity with LGBT politics, respondents overwhelmingly believed that the incorporation of LGBT politics in research and teaching was appropriate or very appropriate. The strongest resistance was to entire undergraduate courses focusing on LGBT politics, but even here, almost three-quarters of the respondents believed that such courses were appropriate or very appropriate (see table 11).

Table 11. LGBT Topics in Research and Teaching

In discussing teaching, survey respondents made conflicting remarks. As Anna Sampaio has noted, issues of identity in the classroom become more complex when an instructor with a subordinated identity is teaching the critical politics of that identity (Sampaio Reference Sampaio2006). One respondent identified student prejudice as the most significant problem for LGBT members of the academy. After describing working at an institution with a welcoming and comfortable climate, the respondent continued, “problems of discrimination tend to occur with undergraduate students who are uncomfortable with professors and teaching assistants who are openly homosexual or transsexual, which negatively affects their careers through student evaluations and inhibiting the ability of the professor to have the necessary respect to effectively teach.”

However, other respondents saw similar interactions—students reacting negatively to their instructors' orientations or identities and challenging their instructors' pedagogical treatments of LGBT topics—but read the students' complaints as legitimate. One respondent explained, “I heard from students that they found it very annoying that their professor in another class spent so much time talking about her own issues related to her lesbian identity. I expect that such discussions hurt her teaching evaluations, but, of course, I have no direct evidence of such.” More information about how attitudes break down by field can be found in the appendix.

LGBT Research

We also consider LGBT research and how members of the profession view it. The survey asked respondents, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation, “Have you ever been discouraged from conducting research on LGBT topics?” The survey also asked, “Have you ever been encouraged to conduct research on LGBT topics?” As noted in table 11, few respondents expressed resistance to LGBT research overall, with only 11%, or 254 respondents, claiming that LGBT research was inappropriate in their fields (an additional 262 respondents answered that they did not know if LGBT research was appropriate). In terms of the advice that scholars have received, few respondents reported either being discouraged from working on LGBT topics or encouraged to work on such topics, though more than twice as many respondents reported encouragement (see table 12).

Table 12. Discouragement and Encouragement

Aside from encouragement or discouragement, LGBT issues are undeniably a part of the discipline. The survey asked if respondents' research interests include LGBT topics. While overall 63% reported not engaging LBGT topics in their research, 15% did so extensively or somewhat, and an additional 22% reported doing so a little. As table 13 indicates, sexual orientation and gender identity were factors here, with LGBT individuals reporting themselves as engaging in extensively or somewhat in research on LGBT topics at higher rates.

Table 13. Research on LGBT Topics

While choices of research topics are highly individual, at least a few respondents reported having shied away from LGBT topics for fear of discrimination either against their scholarly work or against them if they were identified as LGBT. One respondent explained, “There are many reasons I haven't pursued research on LBGT issues, but I do believe that if I were to do so, it would be perceived as a niche topic, and people would suspect I was gay or bisexual.” However, another respondent notes that, while he recognizes the possibility of being identified as gay, he does not allow this to alter research trajectories: “I also worry, frankly, sometimes when I am introduced as someone who has published on gay rights (as happens with a consulting job every couple months) that listeners will make that assumption. But I just put the worry aside, it is not a big deal, it is a thought that crosses my mind, and I'm surprised it still crosses.”

In considering acceptance of LGBT research, some patterns emerge when other factors are considered. Figure 1 sorts responses by faculty rank. The graph illustrates the percentages of non-tenure-track faculty members, assistants, associates, fulls, emeriti, distinguished professors, and top administrators who see research on LGBT topics as highly appropriate, appropriate, and not appropriate in their fields (as well as those reporting that they are unfamiliar with such research). As the survey did not define “appropriate,” respondents likely had a range of interpretations in mind as they answered the question. Enthusiasm for LGBT research appears to peak among associate professors, with half of them rating it as very appropriate and an additional 30% seeing it as appropriate. Interestingly, assistant professors were more likely than either associates or fulls to classify LGBT research as inappropriate in their fields.

Figure 1. Rank and Attitudes about LGBT Research

Less surprising is the relationship between attitudes about the acceptability of LGBT research and the subfield of the respondent. Figure 2 illustrates the responses by primary subfield. Respondents in the fields of public law, American politics, and political theory were the most enthusiastic, with respondents from international relations expressing the strongest opposition and the greatest lack of familiarity.

Figure 2. Subfield and Attitudes about LGBT Research

Most Significant Issues

The survey encouraged respondents, regardless of their orientations or gender identities, to reflect on the challenges for LGBT individuals in the profession. Specifically, respondents were asked, “What do you see as the most significant problems confronting LGBT political scientists now? What kinds of changes in policies, practices, etc. would make life better for LGBT political scientists on your campus or in your organization? In the profession?” The questions produced 874 comments that covered a wide range of issues and concerns. The largest group of respondents identified general prejudice or homophobia in society as the most significant problem. Many of these respondents expressed a belief that the academy was generally less of a problem than the broader social context outside of the universities' doors. As one respondent explained, “I suspect social changes are a lot more important than anything that might change in the discipline.” Related to these kinds of ideas were those expressed by the additional 3.2% of respondents who highlighted discriminatory state or national policies. Some of these respondents framed the university as a haven: “The political environment beyond campus always creates pressure and potential unhappiness and discrimination. On campus life is ‘relatively’ good.”

As table 14 indicates, however, some respondents did identify specific problems on campus. Many—13.6% of those who answered—believed that lack of benefits for same-sex partners was the most significant issue. Another 2.4% identified students' negative attitudes toward LGBTs as the biggest problem. Twelve respondents (1.4%) wrote about religious discrimination or bigotry at Christian institutions, some noting particular problems at Catholic schools. As one respondent explained, “I teach at a conservative Catholic college where ‘out’ LGBT professors are not tolerated by the administration.”

Table 14. Most Significant Problems

Other respondents raised issues about the profession more broadly—13% were concerned that LGBT politics is not fully accepted as legitimate political science. As one respondent wrote, “I think that, in terms of epistemology, dominant research areas and disciplinary culture political science is still oriented primarily around the experience of white, heterosexual males.” An additional 7.8% argued for the mainstreaming of research on LGBT issues and warned against ghettoization of LGBT research (we will discuss this further below). Another 3.8% claimed that the lack of visibility of LGBT scholars was the most significant problem.

Some respondents had more confrontational ideas—78 (8.9%) insisted that no discrimination exists. One respondent wrote, “LGBT people do not have any problems that are related to their sexual orientation or sexual identity in our organization. And no, there are no hidden barriers either.” Another 4.1% expressed hostility toward LGBT research. One type of objection was that this research is insufficiently objective, exemplified by the respondent who wrote, “It is a problem for anyone to confuse his/her personal and professional lives. This seems to be more common with LGBT academics than others.” Another accused LGBT scholars of engaging in “voluntary marginalization through [their] identity politics agenda.” Twenty respondents, comprising 2.3% of those who answered, objected to LGBT individuals themselves: “The most significant problem facing LGBT political scientists is their self-understand[ing] of themselves in terms of their sexual orientation and their pursuit of a lifestyle that is harmful to them and society.”

Ten respondents advocated cultivating conscious ignorance of orientation and gender identity, akin to colorblindness with respect to race. As one respondent wrote, “Why should it matter if someone is straight or gay from the vantage point of a political scientist? We should step away from this and move on toward more necessary issues.” Another simply asserted, “Sexuality should not be relevant in the workplace.”

Finally, some responses could not be categorized, and 9.7% of the respondents specifically wrote that they did not know the most significant problem facing LGBTs in the profession.

Overall, these responses raise an interesting tension among respondents over how to incorporate LGBT issues into the profession. Some insisted that LGBT issues have to be integrated into and interrogated through mainstream political science questions and approaches. One respondent explained, “like research on any topic, research on LBGT topics are ‘serious political science’ as long as such work is rooted in general political science questions.” The respondent went on to encourage more focus on “questions about social mobilization, the use of issues in campaigns, the politics of stigmatized groups, etc.” However, the respondent continued, “I do not believe that courses devoted to understanding ‘what it's like to be LGBT’ are legitimate political science (any more than courses devoted to understanding ‘what it's like to be’ British, or female, or white, or Asian or whatever are legitimate political science).” Respondents who took this approach encouraged more attention to LGBT issues in political science, but advocated against incorporating LGBT issues into the discipline through non-positivist or theoretical investigations. Some respondents also expressed concerns about creating specific intellectual spaces for studying LGBT issues in isolation. One such respondent advocated for “resisting the urge to hibernate in an APSA section—it's too easy to stay in the ghetto and not have much of an influence on the discipline that way. I've seen and fought that in my own primary section.”

Another group of respondents, however, saw the study of LGBT issues as a site for expanding the boundaries of the discipline both in terms of substance and in terms of acceptable epistemologies. One respondent, who critically noted “disciplinary biases towards positive empiricism and the parochial views of the discipline's membership,” argued for thinking through basic disciplinary boundaries more critically by engaging LGBT issues. This respondent explained, “I believe that what gets defined as ‘the political,’ while variable across faculty and the subfields, is rather narrow and thus constrains the definition of ‘serious political science.’” Another respondent mused, “Perhaps because LGBT topics often are interdisciplinary in nature (gender theory as well as ‘normal’ political science), they are not as easily accessible to other political scientists.” The implication of this for this group of scholars, however, is that political science should expand to incorporate these issues and the epistemological approaches that can grapple effectively with them.

This disagreement picks up on crosscutting tensions in the discipline over the relationship between politics and science and over the scope and breadth of epistemologies that belong in political science. A handful of respondents, as noted above, vocally objected to LGBT research generally as inappropriate. Some of these respondents seemed to be motivated by simple animus toward LGBTs, as described above. But others saw research on LGBT issues when performed by LGBT scholars as crossing the firm line that they endorsed between science and advocacy. Several respondents expressed this concern in almost the same words. One wrote, “I do not think that most of the work being done on this issue is serious political science. Instead, I think it is an aggressive advocacy effort.” In these comments, respondents almost uniformly distinguished between “science” and “advocacy,” implying or stating that advocacy does not constitute legitimate political science and in fact runs counter to the discipline's core missions.

Other respondents who criticized LGBT research did so more on methodological and epistemological grounds. Probably the most pointed comment of this nature came from the respondent who wrote, “Frankly, I think this work borders on academic fraud. It is better situated in a critical theory department or the like. (BTW, I think political theory should be shuffled off that way too.)” A less hostile respondent wrote, “LGBT political scientists need to be able to self-identify as such even if they do not necessarily deal primarily with LGBT topics in their research. LGBT research, in turn, should not be so dominated by people with post-modern/queer activist orientations. Let's get out of the ghetto, folks!” The sense of these statements and others like them is that LGBT research in political science is insufficiently positive and empirical and rests too much on cultural studies and theory. These respondents did not by and large appear to object to the study of LGBT topics as political science. In fact, some actively advocated for more research on LGBT topics. But they wanted the research to fit within particular disciplinary frameworks, to the point that they argued implicitly that the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of much work on LGBT topics was the key factor in de-legitimating the research, far above and beyond its substantive focus.