Age, Children and Marital Status Don’t Account for Higher Rates of Employment Among Same-Sex Couples

Among all couples (married or unmarried), same-sex couples were more likely than opposite-sex couples to have both members employed in 2019 (65.1% and 51.1%, respectively), according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS).

Neither age, marriage, nor the presence of children fully explain why same-sex and opposite-sex couples differ when it comes to employment for both members of the couple.

Potential contributing factors include:

• Age. Same-sex couples tended to be younger than opposite-sex couples and less likely to have at least one member eligible for retirement. In fact, 26.0% of opposite-sex couples had at least one person 65 years or older compared with 15.6% of same-sex couples.
• Marital Status. Same-sex couples were more likely to be unmarried (58.0%) than opposite-sex couples (88.3%). Unmarried partners tended to have higher employment rates for both members than their married counterparts.
• Children. Previous analyses of the Current Population Survey showed a smaller share of same-sex couples had children (14.7%) than opposite-sex couples (37.8%). The presence of young children may influence a couple’s decision to have one parent stay home to care for the children.

The ACS does not identify all couples living together since it only collects information on each household member’s relationship to the householder and not about the relationships between all household members. Still, most couples do include the householder.

Age and Sex

Age has a strong association with whether or not a person is working or looking for work.

For example, older people may choose to retire and leave the labor force. Whether people are enrolled in school — high school, college or graduate school — may also affect a person’s decision to work.

To account for these potential age-related influences, we focused on couples between the ages of 25 to 64, ages when adults are most likely to work.

When we looked at this subset of couples, same-sex couples were still more likely to have both people employed: 74.1% of same-sex couples compared with only 64.9% of opposite-sex couples (Figure 1).

Danielle Taylor is a former statistician in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch who now works at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This article was filed under:

[
Employment
](https://www.census.gov/library/stories.html?visual-list-fb55843e87:filters=Census:Topic/Employment)

[
Families and Living Arrangements
](https://www.census.gov/library/stories.html?visual-list-fb55843e87:filters=Census:Topic/Families)

[
Population
](https://www.census.gov/library/stories.html?visual-list-fb55843e87:filters=Census:Topic/ThePopulation)

[
Same-Sex Couples
](https://www.census.gov/library/stories.html?visual-list-fb55843e87:filters=Census:Topic/Families/same-sex-couples)

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