“Yep, I’m gay.” — Ellen Degeneres

Back in June, NPR reported, “This may break the hearts of 12-year-old boys. Or fascinate them. But in any case, Batwoman is coming out of the closet. D.C. Comics says the superhero will return to the comic pages as a lesbian. She has flowing red hair, knee-high boots and a tight black outfit. But an editor says she needed a ‘more unique personality.’ The company wants more diversity, though a critic on the Web says if they really wanted diversity, they’d make a superhero ugly.”

I’ve always been out at work. I typically never bring up the topic of my sexuality but when asked if I’m married or if I have kids, I always reply that I have a partner and now I add that we’re trying to have a baby. This usually prompts additional questions and most often we end up having a thoughtful conversation. At a minimum, being gay makes me more unique. Now if I just had the body of Batwoman.

Has it ever helped my career and equate to me making more money? Personally, I’m not sure there’s any correlation, but Time magazine argues that there is a connection between success and gay executives that elect to be out in the jobs.

Dawn already mentioned the article that states that Gay Men and Women Earn More in the UK. But Andrea Sachs at Time wrote an article called Come Out. Move Up? and concludes through interviews that “Gay managers work differently than straight managers, and they may be better in some respects, says University of Southern California teacher and researcher Kirk Snyder, who personally interviewed 150 gay male executives who have come out in the workplace, the largest study of its kind.”

“His theory is that such gay corporate leaders show higher levels of seven desirable management skills, such as creativity, intuition and collaboration. Snyder and many other gay executives and leaders (all the people quoted in this article are openly gay) believe those superior skills are born of the challenges that gays must overcome.”

Says Snyder: “It wasn’t as though gay executives all said, ‘Oh, let’s go to Fire Island this weekend and decide what kind of managers we should be.’ This emerged independently of any kind of organized effort. It’s the experience of being gay in a straight world that has manifested itself in these characteristics when you get in the workplace.”

However, with all the progress made in corporate America there are still 33 states where people can be fired for being gay. And a few researchers conclude that it can negatively influence your paycheck. Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at UCLA says, “Gay men in particular have earnings similar to other men, but partnered gay men have earnings quite substantially below men who partner with women.”

Gates has a theory about the disparity: “Being gay has impact, particularly on the executive level. You can’t go to the golf club with your wife. Your wife can’t entertain the spouses.” For lesbians, he notes that the story is somewhat different. “They still don’t do as well as men, but lesbians tend to do better than women with male partners. They are less likely to have children and are in the labor force more consistently.”

Maybe Batwoman is on to something!