Happy Pride! This blog has a bit of a long intro discussing the silencing of LGBTQ+ experiences in large datasets. To jump right into the economic wellbeing data analysis, please scroll down to the What the data says section.
Revisiting invisibility in the data two years later
Two years ago, I wrote a blog titled The invisibility of LGBTQ+ communities in data, detailing the critical importance of being represented in the data. The piece discussed at length the need to safely and accurately collect sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) information and praised the U.S. Census’ work around piloting SOGI data collection in preparation for their annual American Community Survey.
- Two years later and 367 steps backward. According to regularly updated research from UCLA’s Williams Institute, 367 federal data collection entities have removed measures related to gender identity and/or sexual orientation. Kaiser Family Foundation published a helpful report detailing some of the changes to the government’s largest data collection efforts.
- Two years later and 3,400 steps backward. Gender identity, sexual orientation, HIV, and climate change were essentially erased in an early 2025 executive order that required federal agencies to censor their work. This resulted in nearly 3,400 federal datasets being lost or tampered with. This executive order also resulted in over 8,000 web pages across government websites also being removed or censored. Thankfully, there have been comprehensive efforts to preserve this original uncensored data, but the damage to future government research and data collection remains.
- Two years later and 30,609,989 steps backward. An estimated 9.0 percent of the U.S. population identifies as LGBTQ+. That represents approximately 30.6 million Americans who will continue to remain partially invisible now that the work to implement SOGI questions Census American Community Survey has been stalled. A Census slide deck from 2024 indicates that they had planned to begin collecting that data in 2027.
In that original blog, I detailed how the census researchers highlighted the importance of their early work in capturing SOGI data. I wrote:
In 2021, for the first time ever on a census-sponsored product, sexual orientation and gender identity data was asked. And immediately the importance of that update was made clear. Early findings of this new data evidenced that “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT) respondents […] were more likely than non-LGBT respondents to experience economic and mental health hardships during the COVID-19 pandemic.’ More in-depth analysis that explored changes in this data over an 18-month period from July 2021 to December 2022 concluded, “The most obvious result is that sexual minorities, or respondents answering other than straight to the sexual orientation question, were more likely than straight respondents to face each type of hardship.”
None of those census citation-links work anymore. If you didn’t know to look for the data, it’s as if that work never happened, and those identified disparities don’t exist.
I don’t mean to belabor the damages done to LGBTQ+ communities when their experiences are ignored in our shared data. But the damage that’s been done feels dire; data shapes policies, quantifies needs, measures impact, and drives resource allocation.
When this censorship is hopefully finally lifted, there will forever be a gap in our data where LGBTQ+ experiences are still invisible.
A data surprise: the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED)
Every year, the Federal Reserve conducts a massive survey of economic wellbeing across the United States called the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). Just last month they released their data for their 2025 survey, which surveyed nearly 13,000 adults across the country. Page 105 offered a surprising data point.
Imagine my shock while skimming the 119-page SHED codebook, I came across a measure for sexual orientation.
According to the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement and Research (CLEAR), the federal reserve started collecting sexual orientation information in 2019. CLEAR analyzed that new data in an extensive 2021 report, concluding that the data “show that in 2019 discriminatory economic inequality persists for LGBT households in the United States, and LGBT adults continue to have more considerable obstacles in their path to creating financial security for themselves, their families, and communities.” (p.41). This was likely well known by CLEAR and other LGBTQ+ serving organizations, but now there was Federal Reserve data to quantify the disparity.
In October 2025, 560 Ohioans participated in the SHED survey. Forty-one (7.3 percent) of those respondents identified as either Gay or lesbian, bisexual, or “Something else.” Forty-one is not a big sample, but the Federal Reserve uses a rigorous probability-based sampling method, and provides survey weights for all cases to make the sample more reflective of the actual population.
The inclusion of this sexual orientation question affords the opportunity to explore some key estimates of economic wellbeing for LGBT folks in Ohio. It also allows for the comparison of those experiences to Ohioans who identified as straight, highlighting important disparities.
LANGUAGE NOTE: the analyses here will refer to respondents who selected Gay or Lesbian, Bisexual, or Something else, as “LGBT,” following the language that CLEAR’s 2021 report used.
What the data says
Perception of financial situation
About 65 percent of LGBT respondents reported doing at least “okay” financially these days. Roughly one in seven respondents reported finding it difficult to get by financially.
The SHED survey asks how respondents felt about their economic situation compared to a year ago. A concerning 43 percent of LGBT respondents reported feeling somewhat or much worse off financially compared to where they were a year ago.
Economic concerns
The SHED survey measures concerns around one’s financial situation, asking respondents to rate how much the statement “I am concerned that my money won’t last” applies to them. For LGBT respondents in Ohio, nearly one in three replied that this sentiment applies to them completely. Another 17 percent reported that this applies to them very well.
When asked if you have set aside an emergency/rainy day fund to cover three months of expenses, less than 42 percent indicated they did.
Financial opportunity
Close to 60 percent of LGBT respondents reported their credit scores as being either good or excellent. Only 13 percent reported their credit scores being poor or worse.
Two in five LGBT respondents don’t have a retirement account of any kind.
General information
When asked to rate their health, just over two thirds (68 percent) of LGBT respondents reported that their health is at least good.
Here is the distribution of annual household incomes of the LGBT respondents.
Comparisons and contextualization
To better contextualize the economic wellbeing of Ohioans who are LGBT, as well as identify disparities, it is necessary to compare these metrics between Ohioans who identified as LGBT, to those who identified as straight. To determine whether any differences in responses between LGBT Ohioans and straight Ohioans were significant, a series of chi-square tests were conducted.
Significance was determined at p < .05 (a generally accepted standard for social sciences). A “significant” difference means the differences are unlikely to be due to chance and likely reflect a real difference. There were significant differences in responses among the following measures.
When thinking about the last year, significantly more straight respondents reported that they were doing about the same, or better off financially than LGBT respondents.
The difference was statistically significant (p = .04).
Significantly fewer LGBT respondents have the funds to cover three months of expenses in the case of an emergency compared to straight respondents. The difference was statistically significant (p = .05).
Significantly more LGBT respondents are concerned that their money won’t last
Only five percent reported this sentiment doesn’t apply to them at all. Amongst straight respondents, a quarter said this statement doesn’t apply to them. The difference was statistically significant (p = .02).
While rates of very poor and poor credit scores were similar, about twice as many straight respondents reported having excellent credit scores (62 percent) compared to LGBT respondents (31 percent). The difference was statistically significant (p = <.01).
One of the starkest differences in the data came from the health metric
About 33 percent of LGBT respondents reported their health as either fair or poor, compared to only 15 percent of straight respondents. Over half (52 percent) of straight respondents reported their health as at least very good. Only 25 percent of LGBT respondents felt the same. The difference was statistically significant (p = <.01).
It’s also important to report the data points that were not significantly different
From the 2025 SHED dataset, there were no significant differences between LGBT respondents and straight respondents when it came to:
- Household Income
- The question: Overall, which one of the following best describes how well you are managing financially these days?
- The question: Do you have a retirement account? (This was approaching significantly different at p = .08)
This is not to definitively say these differences don’t exist between LGBT people and straight people in Ohio, but they weren’t significantly different in this dataset. Because the sample size of LGBT respondents in Ohio was small, differences had to be larger to be determined as significant.
LGBT Ohioans report more financial worry
Despite the respondents having similar household incomes, LGBT folks in Ohio reported being in more financially precarious situations compared to Ohioans who identified as straight. LGBT respondents reported:
- more financial concerns
- worse credit scores
- fewer respondents had emergency funds
Despite reporting similar broad sentiments on their current financial situations, significantly fewer LGBT respondents felt they were faring financially better off today as they were a year ago.
These analyses can’t definitively say why these disparities exist. But it’s important to note that in this dataset, these disparities can’t be simply attributed to common predictors of financial wellbeing like household income, or employment status. In fact, significantly more (p = .04) LGBT respondents were employed (77 percent) than straight respondents (61 percent).
One factor that could provide some explanation for these disparities is age.
LGBT respondents in the SHED data were significantly (p < .01) younger than the straight respondents, with the average age of LGBT respondents being 31, compared to 49 for straight respondents. Older generations are typically more financially stable, but this age difference is reflective of the national data on LGBTQ+ communities.
Per Gallup’s 2026 public polling research “the recent increase in LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. is primarily driven by higher rates among those in the younger generations. In the latest data, 23% of adults under age 30 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 10% of those aged 30 to 49 and 3% or less among those aged 50 and older.” So, this age difference shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly of the dataset.
Looking forward: the questions we ask determine the quality of the data
Community Solutions has recently been writing about the rising costs of household goods and stricter access to benefits putting unbearable strains on households across Ohio. But effective advocacy around these issues necessitates comprehensive data to quantify the need and measure the impacts of policies. Everything explored here was only possible because the Federal Reserve deemed it important in 2019 to ask respondents about their sexual orientation.
Without this one question, LGBT Ohioans and the disparities in economic wellbeing they face would remain invisible in the dataset.
The experiences of transgender individuals specifically continue to be lost in these datasets, however. While the SHED survey does ask about sex assigned at birth and current gender identity, both questions follow a strict, unrepresentative female/male man/woman binary. And when CLEAR first analyzed this data back in 2021, they reported too few trans individuals nationally took part in the survey, limiting analysis opportunities. This continues to be a deficit in large data collections.
Taking up space matters
Despite my enthusiasm about the SHED survey capturing information around sexual orientation, I don’t want to over sell the insights gleaned from this one dataset. Forty-one LGBT respondents is a small sample that can’t hope to fully capture the experiences of all LGBT folks in Ohio. In Northeast Ohio, Andrew Snyder’s work with the LGBTQ+ Community Needs Assessments of Akron, Cleveland, and Greater Mahoning Valley, is something of a gold standard for rigorously capturing and analyzing the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in the region.
In the LGBT Center of Cleveland’s open letter kicking off Pride this year, Managing Director Gular Feerasta wrote that Pride is “…where we gather not only to celebrate who we are, but to insist on our right to exist fully, safely, and with dignity. […] Taking up space matters. […] We are still here. And we are not going anywhere.” (p.6).
A critical part of this right to exist is safely being represented in the measures and datasets that shape our policies and drive resource allocation. Quantitative representation in national datasets is of course not the only, nor the most important kind of representation LGBTQ+ communities and their allies continue to fight for. But the invisibility of our neighbors in our critically important and influential data systems is unacceptable. Especially when such disparities persist.
SHED Data Citation
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking [dataset] (Washington: Board of Governors, 2026), https:// doi.org/10.17016/datasets.002
