![top 20 famous gay men who married women top 20 famous gay men who married women](https://i.natgeofe.com/n/381fd830-b18c-4a3c-a004-d0557b3352ca/historical-lgbt-bayard-rustin_3x2.jpg)
To be fair, tax records can give an incomplete picture, but the problem is more political than methodological. The joint tax returns were matched with the Social Security Administration’s data, so there’s less chance that gender is misreported. Which is why the Treasury’s use of administrative data is so important. The Census Bureau has been pretty upfront about its problems and even produced a delightfully nerdy video about its mistakes. But Gary Gates, former research director at the Williams Institute, notes it’s likely that some errors persist. Using a database of gender probabilities for each given name, the bureau was able go back and correct the misreporting. It turns out that, even today, most first names are strongly associated with one gender. How did the Census Bureau try to control for this error? Simple.
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This resulted, according to some estimates, in as much as a 25 percent overcount of gay couples. One of the more interesting problems was that many straight couples were being classified as gay because of incorrectly checked boxes on a census form. The problem with estimating gay and lesbian populations is that they represent such a small fraction of the total population any mistakes in how people answered their census forms are likely to push the number of gay couples and, in particular, gay married couples wildly out of focus.Īnd in fact, this is what happened in the 2000 census and again in 2010.
![top 20 famous gay men who married women top 20 famous gay men who married women](https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5cf18e563fe2aa13ea75a352/3:2/w_3156,h_2104,c_limit/GettyImages-51147201.jpg)
Normally that is sufficient for most kinds of estimates such as average family sizes, car ownership or other measures. For detailed records of American life, the Census Bureau usually employs surveys of a small but statistically representative sample of Americans. This difference is particularly important when it comes to counting gay and lesbian populations. It doesn’t rely on samples as the census does, but uses all the tax records in America. The Treasury’s tally of same-sex marriages is very different from that of the census - roughly half what the census estimates. The average age of same-sex filers is 47, while the average age for those in straight couples is 51. Those in same-sex marriages tend to be a little younger than those in straight marriages. Among the same-sex marriages, 55 percent involved same-sex women and 45 percent same-sex men. Women gravitated toward commitment more than men. And their estimate is this: In 2014 there were 183,280 same-sex marriages in America, roughly a third of 1 percent of all marriages. Methodological problems like sample size and false positives have long plagued census estimates of this relatively small group.īut a new research paper published by the Treasury Department on Monday has found an interesting way around these problems: tax records.īy linking the tax returns of same-sex couples who filed jointly in 2014 with their Social Security records, researchers are able to give us the most accurate picture of same-sex marriages to date.
![top 20 famous gay men who married women top 20 famous gay men who married women](https://www.history.com/.image/ar_1:1%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_1200/MTY0Njg0ODgyNzQ2ODExOTU1/gettyimages-481601431-copy.jpg)
The Census Bureau isn’t always a lot of help either. They’re managed by counties and states, which report the count of marriages and not much else. One reason it’s hard to get a fix on the marriages is that detailed marriage records are not tracked at the federal level. In fact, no one has a definitive count of gay married couples in the United States. More than three years after a Supreme Court decision gave federal recognition to same-sex marriages performed in states that allowed them, the demographics of same-sex married couples largely remain a mystery.