LGBTQ Identities and Career Plan Changes in Young Adulthood: Implications for Occupational Segregation and Disparities

Abstract

Many young adults change their career plans after spending some time in the labor force, and those who hold marginalized identities change their plans in unique ways as they respond to unfair treatments in workplaces. Past research on this topic focused on (cisgender) women and people of color, and little is known about how LGBTQ people change their career plans. Furthermore, many LGBTQ youth today develop optimistic views that their sexual and gender identities will not undermine their career opportunities, but the existing literature provides limited information about whether they maintain such views after their transition to the labor force and how they change their career plans if their perceptions of career disadvantages change. To fill these gaps in the literature, the authors analyzed longitudinal data from in-depth interviews with 37 LGBTQ young adults, who were followed over 2 to 10 years at 2-year intervals. The data showed that young LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes were intertwined with their sexual and gender identities. For example, some participants decided to move to more LGBTQ-friendly careers after experiencing workplace harassment and heteronormativity and cisnormativity, and those who had entered careers that allowed them to integrate their LGBTQ identities into work decided to leave the careers because of emotional burnout. Overall, the results suggest that LGBTQ people’s career plan adjustments to identity-related challenges at work operate as a worker-level mechanism that contributes to labor market segregation and financial disparities between LGBTQ and straight, cisgender workers.

Keywords

discrimination LGBTQ occupations work workplaces young adulthood

Many young workers change their career plans after spending some time in the labor force. These changes occur for various reasons, including workers’ discovery of new interests and their failures in entering career paths that they had initially sought (Kerckhoff 2003; McClelland 1990; Mortimer et al. 2002). Studying career plan changes is important because they show systematic patterns across social positions and have substantial implications for labor market inequalities and segregation. For example, socially marginalized groups such as women and people of color show unique patterns of career plan adjustments because they have to respond to distinct challenges, including harassment and glass ceiling, after their transitions to the labor force (Cohen 2014; Mortimer and Fischer 2017). Career changes not only undermine young workers’ sense of autonomy but also delay career progress, which in turn negatively affects wage trajectories (Fuller 2008; Krahn, Howard, and Galambos 2015). Some of these young workers from marginalized groups move to employers, occupations, and industries which they perceive as more accepting of their groups. For these reasons, marginalized workers’ career plan adjustments to unfair treatments in the workplace operate as a worker-level mechanism that contributes to labor market inequalities and segregation.

Past research on marginalized workers’ career plan changes has focused on people of color and (cisgender) women (Cohen 2014; Mortimer and Fischer 2017), and little is known about LGBTQ people. Studying LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes is important for a few reasons. First, discrimination against LGBTQ workers and heteronormativity and cisnormativity persist in U.S. workplaces (Giuffre, Dellinger, and Williams 2008; HRC 2018; Rumens and Kerfoot 2009), which may create unique patterns of career plan changes among them. Second, despite these adversities for LGBTQ workers, many LGBTQ youth develop optimistic views about their career chances (Adams, Cahill, and Ackerlind 2005; Ueno et al. 2018; Harris 2014), indicating that they may adjust their plans after fully transitioning to the labor force. Third, LGBTQ workers experience financial disadvantages and segregation in the labor market (Badgett, Carpenter, and Sansone 2021; Ciprikis, Cassells, and Berrill 2020; Finnigan 2020). Their career adjustments to workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity in young adulthood may partly account for their financial disadvantages and occupational segregation.

In the present study, we examine LGBTQ young adults’ career plan changes by analyzing longitudinal data from in-depth interviews with LGBTQ young adults, whom we followed 2 to 10 years at 2-year intervals. The analysis shows three major patterns of career plan changes that are intertwined with their LGBTQ identities: (1) transitioning to LGBTQ-friendly careers due to experiences of workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity in the current workplaces; (2) transition out of identity-inspired careers because of emotional burnout; and (3) career cooling out, synced with increasing involvement with the LGBTQ community. Overall, the results suggest that LGBTQ people’s career plan adjustments to identity-related challenges operate as a worker-level mechanism that contributes to labor market segregation and disparities between LGBTQ and straight, cisgender workers.

Career Plans in Young Adulthood

In this article, we define career plans as workers’ expectations regarding which industries and occupations they plan to enter. Career plans vary in the levels of ambition and confidence as well as the target timing of attainment (Mortimer et al. 2002; Staff et al. 2010). To plan their careers, young workers consider their educational background, work histories, and lifestyles while observing opportunities and constraints in the labor market (Heinz 2002). Strategic planning is critical for successful careers particularly in the United States, which lacks institutional mechanisms that send graduates to employers. Furthermore, the rising trend of neoliberalism in recent decades has increased individual workers’ responsibilities to strategically invest in themselves, take personal risks in finding jobs, and continuously assess their career progress (Mrozowicki and Trappmann 2021; Sofritti et al. 2020).

Many past studies examined young people’s job changes (i.e., changes in employers). Job changes do not necessarily indicate career plan changes because workers may perceive their job changes as inconsequential for their long-term goals. Nonetheless, some job changes result from or result in career plan changes. These studies showed that young workers frequently and voluntarily change jobs, which scholars call “floundering” (Kerckhoff 2003; Mortimer et al. 2002). A tendency for job floundering has long existed in the United States, but labor globalization and employment precarity in recent decades have exacerbated this tendency (Fergusson et al. 2000; Mrozowicki and Trappmann 2021).

In contrast to these studies that examined job changes, other studies directly examined why and how young people change their career plans. Those changes may represent young people’s responses to work-related events such as layoffs and discovery of new job opportunities as well as events outside their work life such as family transitions and illness (Heinz 2002; Raito and Lahelma 2015). Some changes in career plans are self-initiated (e.g., seeking higher paying careers) whereas others are involuntary (e.g., termination, unexpected pregnancy). For many young workers in the United States, career plan changes reflect a “cooling out” process: they develop ambitious career plans in adolescence, and they scale down their goals to more realistic ones as they face challenges in attaining their initial goals (McClelland 1990; Shu and Marini 2008).

Patterns of career plan adjustments vary across social groups. For example, workers of color more frequently change their career plans because of workplace discrimination (Mortimer and Fischer 2017). Women, especially those who have lower levels of education, struggle to keep stable careers because they are more likely than men to experience career interruptions due to parenting and other family responsibilities and because employers do not provide sufficient support (Bradley and Devadason 2008; Cohen 2014; Stone 2007). Patterns of career plan changes also vary across socioeconomic classes (Cech 2021; Hamilton and Armstrong 2021). Despite the substantial amount of existing knowledge on career plan changes in these marginalized groups, little is known about those among LGBTQ workers.

Studying LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes is important because they face unique challenges in workplaces, which may create distinct patterns of career plan changes. LGBTQ people are legally protected by a 2020 Supreme Court decision that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientations and gender identities, and in recent years, an increasing number of employers have instituted antidiscrimination policies and other resources for their LGBTQ workers (HRC 2021). Nonetheless, discrimination persists in U.S. workplaces. According to HRC (2018), 18 percent of LGBTQ workers reported that their colleagues had made inappropriate sexual jokes to them, and 54 percent reported hearing their colleagues make jokes about gay men or lesbian women. Furthermore, many workplaces, including those that claim to be and are known as LGBTQ friendly, remain heteronormative and cisnormative (i.e., privilege heterosexuality and cisgender over other sexualities and genders). Specifically, LGBTQ workers are pressured to assimilate into the heteronormative, cisnormative culture by emphasizing their sameness with heterosexual, cisgender workers and downplay their identities (Giuffre et al. 2008; Rumens and Kerfoot 2009).

Another reason to study LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes is that they do not necessarily anticipate these challenges when developing their career plans in their youth. Many LGBTQ youth today anticipate that they will experience minimal career disadvantages for their sexual and gender identities, and some even anticipate career advantages (Adams et al. 2005; Harris 2014). In our study of LGBTQ young adults (ages 18–25 years), many participants anticipated that their future colleagues would accept their sexual and gender identities, and some even believed that their LGBTQ status would enhance their careers because employers seek to diversify their workplaces and because they believed they had special skills as LGBTQ persons (artistic creativity, knowledge about diversity issues) (Ueno et al. 2018). Our follow-up study showed that after their transitions to the labor force, many young LGBTQ workers maintained these optimistic views (Ueno et al. 2020). Although they observed mixed signs of workplace climates, they tended to derive a sense of acceptance by focusing on positive signs such as colleagues’ friendly responses to their identity disclosure. This optimistic sentiment may reflect the recently emerged “postcloset” discourse, which emphasizes that LGBTQ people are now accepted and integrated into the mainstream society and that their sexual and gender identities are only as one of many personal attributes, rather than an attribute that overrides other self-identities (Ghaziani 2011; Seidman 2002). The discourse is particularly prevalent among young LGBTQ people. However, the existing literature does not address whether and how LGBTQ workers’ perceptions of workplace climates and their career plans change as they spend more time in the labor force.

Yet another reason for studying LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes is to identify implications for their financial disadvantages and labor market segregation from straight, cisgender workers. Gay and bisexual men and transgender people experience wage penalties relative to straight men and cisgender people respectively (Badgett et al. 2021; Ciprikis et al. 2020), and bisexual women and transgender people have particularly high rates of poverty (Badgett, Choi, and Wilson 2019). These financial disadvantages may be results of discrimination in evaluations and promotions, which may compel LGBTQ workers to change their careers, or consequences of their transitions to new careers that provide LGBTQ-friendly environments but pay less. Either way, their financial penalties are likely intertwined with their career plan changes.

Although little research has been conducted to directly examine LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes, it does suggest that a substantial number of LGBTQ workers revise their career plans in response to their experiences of workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity. In HRC’s (2018) survey, 1 in 5 LGBTQ workers have sought a different employer, and 1 in 10 had actually left a job because of a hostile workplace climate. Furthermore, LGBTQ workers are underrepresented in certain industries and occupations that tend to have chilly climates (e.g., engineering [Cech and Waidzunas 2011]; gender-typical occupations for LGBQ workers [Finnigan 2020; Ueno, Roach, and Peña-Talamantes 2013]). Lesbian and gay workers are also more likely than straight workers to be self-employed, perhaps to avoid workplace discrimination and heteronormativity (Tilcsik, Anteby, and Knight 2015). These patterns of labor market segregation may result partly from LGBTQ workers’ career changes, rather than their initial transitions to the labor force.

Career Plans as Personal Narratives

In this study, we draw on the personal narrative literature to address how LGBTQ workers explain changes in their career plans. People construct personal narratives in everyday life by interpreting past and ongoing events and explaining how they happened (Cohler and Hostetler 2003; Ewick and Silbey 1995). Narrative construction allows people to manage multiple selves across time and space and maintain a sense of coherence (Giddens 1991). People do not necessarily create narratives from scratch, but they creatively draw on existing social discourses as rhetorical resources (Ezzy 1997). By doing so, people can craft narratives that are legitimate to others and themselves.

People construct narratives about their occupational careers by interpreting their work histories (Heinz 2002). Career narratives not only describe workers’ challenges and accomplishments in their previous and current jobs but also explain or justify their career choices (LaPointe 2010; Mallett and Wapshott 2015). Narrative construction is a continual process over the life course (Cohler and Hostetler 2003), and workers reinterpret past work experiences and career decisions by drawing on their present experiences and social discourses presently available (Cohen 2014). Career narratives do not always focus on past and present work experiences, but they also lay out plans for future work (Heinz 2002).

In the United States and other Western countries, people are socialized to craft uplifting stories that emphasize desirable changes and provide a sense of progression and improvement (Frank 1993; Gergen and Gergen 1997). Young adult workers show this tendency in their career narratives by framing their career trajectories as their pursuit of self-growth, passions, and contributions to society (Cech 2021; Wise and Millward 2005). In the present study, we seek to uncover how LGBTQ workers describe their career trajectories and how they explain the role of their LGBTQ identities in their careers.

Methods

The data came from an ongoing longitudinal study of in-depth interviews with LGBTQ young adults (Ueno et al. 2018, 2020). We recruited participants in a southeastern city in the United States in 2011 and 2012 and again in 2018. In the initial interviews, many of them were in college. They participated in two to five follow-up interviews in 2-year intervals, with the most recent interviews in 2023. All participants had fully transitioned to the labor force over the course of the study and spent 3 to 12 years in the labor force. On average, they were 28.2 years old in their most recent interviews. Most participants had left the original study location, although a majority stayed in the southeastern region.

We specified participation criteria as follows: (1) identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual or have attraction to people of the same gender and (2) age between 18 and 25 years at the time of their first interviews. Because the project initially focused on sexual minorities, gender minorities were not specifically sought out. Although a fair number of participants reported nonbinary identities, the study included only one transgender woman and no transgender men. Table 1 summarizes sample characteristics.

Table 1.

Characteristics of Study Participants at the Time of Their Most Recent Interviews (n = 37).

Characteristic	n
Sexual identity
Lesbian	5
Gay	13
Bisexual	5
Pansexual	1
Queer	12
Flexible	1
Gender
Women	11
Men	16
Trans woman	1
Nonbinary	8
Flexible	1
Age
Mean	28.2
Minimum, maximum	22, 35
Race/ethnicity
White	26
Black	6
Hispanic	1
Asian	2
Mixed	2
Educational degree
High school	3
Associate	2
Bachelor	18
Master’s	9
Doctoral	2
Professional	3

We conducted initial interviews in person and follow-up interviews through video calls. The semistructured interviews covered a wide range of topics, but the present article focuses on participants’ responses to several key questions. In the initial interview, we asked, “Do you have a plan for your career? What do you plan to do for your occupational career?” Some participants reported detailed plans to enter specific occupations and work for specific employers whereas others only had broad ideas about their desired industries. In follow-up interviews, we checked their current plans against the ones that they mentioned in the previous interviews, and if there was a disagreement, we asked, “In the last interview, you described your plan as X. Is this still your plan?” If their plan changed, we asked, “Why did the plan change?” Perhaps there were various strategies to examine how LGBTQ identities influence career plan changes, but our strategy was to directly ask participants because we were interested in whether and how they engaged their LGBTQ identities in their career narratives. Therefore, we asked, “Is the reason for the change related to your sexual or gender identity in any way?”

We transcribed the interviews and analyzed the text data by engaging in “flexible coding,” which allows efficient and effective coding of in-depth interview data by combining induction from data and deduction from theories and past research and by incorporating qualitative software into the coding process (Deterding and Waters 2021). The first round of coding identified interview segments that indicated changes in career plans (“index coding”). In this process, memos were taken to record reasons for the changes, while paying close attention to whether and how participants linked the plan changes to their LGBTQ identities. The second round of coding used these notes to classify interview segments into major themes, which served as the “analytical codes” (Deterding and Waters 2021). We read the data multiple times to refine these themes, and the final themes are presented in the next section.

Results

Changes in career plans were common among participants, with 84 percent reporting at least one change and 51 percent reporting multiple changes. Among those who changed their career plans, some had already started new careers, whereas others stayed in the same jobs while preparing for the transitions. Participants gave various reasons for career plan changes, which are summarized in Table 2. Some reasons represented push factors, which caused them to stop pursuing their initial goals, and others represented pull factors, which encouraged them to seek new goals. The most common reason for career plan changes was losing interest or losing passion for the initial plan. Some of these participants initially had ambitious plans, and they had to “cool out” (McClelland 1990) because of their unsuccessful job search.

Table 2.

Reasons for Career Changes.

Push factors

Lost interest or lost passion over time

Could not get on the desired career path

Found out that opportunities for promotions were limited

Low pay or employment insecurity

Faced discrimination or hostile climate

Felt burnt out or avoided getting burnt out

Achieved the initial goal (and aiming for a more advanced goal)

High work demands

Increased caretaking responsibilities at home

Moved to a new city for partner’s job/education or for a larger local LGBTQ community

Pull factors

Better opportunities for promotions and salary

Better workplace/industry climate for LGBTQ workers

Developed new interests through the current job, volunteer work, etc.

Recruited or encouraged to apply for the position

As participants narrated their career plan changes, they linked the changes to their LGBTQ identities in three ways: (1) transitioning to LGBTQ-friendly careers due to experiences of workplace discrimination or heteronormativity and cisnormativity in the current workplaces; (2) leaving LGBTQ-inspired careers because of burnout; and (3) career cooling out, synced with increasing involvement in the LGBTQ community. These patterns overlapped to some extent, and multiple processes occurred in some cases. For the remainder of this section, we illustrate each of these themes.

Transitioning to More LGBTQ-Friendly Careers Due to Experiences of Discrimination and Heteronormativity and Cisnormativity in the Current Careers

Some participants decided to seek new careers because they faced workplace discrimination or heteronormativity and cisnormativity in their current workplaces. These participants sought new careers in industries or geographical locations that they believed would have more friendly climates for LGBTQ workers. This pattern resembled previous findings of young people of color who gave up their initial careers because of their experiences of racial discrimination (Mortimer and Fischer 2017) and women who decided to leave the labor force or start their own business because of a lack of opportunities in their previous workplaces (Cohen 2014; Stone 2007). We show, however, that for LGBTQ workers, this type of career plan adjustment was intertwined with their coming out process and increasing pressure they received from colleagues and supervisors about suppressing their LGBTQ identities. These participants’ perceptions of career changes became less optimistic over time, and they came to view their LGBTQ identities as a source of risks for their careers.

Susan (a White bisexual woman) was one of the participants who reported this type of career changes. She was working at a life insurance company as a customer support representative when we first interviewed her, and her initial plan was to move up in the company. At that time, she was generally happy with the workplace climate because “we are closely knit and getting along with each other.” By the second interview, she encountered many instances of heteronormative interactions in the workplace. For example, colleagues denied the possibility that two same-sex clients on a survivorship arrangement were a couple. These incidents made her realize that “the industry is so male-heavy and just so conservative that it is much easier to just find something else, and it definitely makes me want to get away from life insurance.” Consequently, she moved to a credit card processing company, which she believed treated LGBTQ workers “incredibly well” because the industry had emerged more recently from a technology field.

Although not all participants had been direct targets of workplace discrimination, those who had such experiences reported substantial impacts on their career plans. For example, Kaley (a White queer, nonbinary person) worked in a bakery store and developed a long-term goal to start their own bakery store. At that point, they believed that their queer/nonbinary identity would have minimal impacts on their career. They commented, “Because of how open I am, my identity could actually make my career easier in a way.”

By the next interview, however, Kaley had experienced multiple incidents of harassment from customers while working at the bakery store, whereby customers questioned Kaley’s gender identity and attempted to get them fired by talking to the manager. These incidents led Kaley to change their career plans and become a dental technician. They explained,

I didn’t want to work with people up front, face-to-face anymore. I chose dental technology (as my new career) because I don’t have to interact with tons of people on a daily basis. I might have to interact with a dentist or two, but I don’t have to interact with customers or patients every day.

Their story resonated with an argument that LGBTQ people seek careers that allow autonomy to reduce their risk for facing discrimination (Tilcsik et al. 2015). The current results showed that for some people like Kaley, such career strategies emerge after they spend some time in the labor force and experience discrimination. The current results also indicate that some LGBTQ people have to prepare for their second careers, like Kaley had to go to a dental technology school. Therefore, these participants had to manage costs in time and money, in addition to psychological stress associated with facing discrimination and giving up their initial careers.

Montell (a Black gay man) also went through a series of career plan changes, partly because of his experiences of workplace discrimination and heteronormativity. His case demonstrates that LGBTQ workers’ decisions to leave heteronormative workplaces may be intertwined with their coming out process and that their racial identities may play an important role in this process for LGBTQ workers of color. In the most recent interview, Montell reflected on his career changes as follows:

When I first met with you guys [for an interview], I had been working for the state government. I could not come out as gay, and that was one of the reasons why I left. The culture there was not accepting of my lifestyle choice [i.e., being gay]. I left there and [started working at] X Hotel, but I didn’t get a promotion that my manager and I felt I deserved. I think it might have been because of my lifestyle. And then I moved to [a larger city], thinking that [the climate for LGBTQ workers] would be different. I worked for a non-profit organization where I was helping youth get their GED. It can be very, very difficult to work with, especially when you live an alternate lifestyle as a Black man. My manager made it very evident that I needed to go to church and find me a woman to marry. All of those things made me change careers. So, when I came to this [consulting] organization in 2016, it was a culture shock because now I can finally be myself.

Thus, Montell left his previous workplaces in response to his experiences of discrimination or heteronormativity in each workplace: a hostile climate in the state government, a denied promotion in the hotel, and his manager’s moral judgement at the nonprofit organization. Each of his career moves represented his search for a friendlier workplace. For example, he believed the hotel industry had a friendlier climate due to a concentration of gay men workers, and he assumed that the nonprofit organization would have a friendlier climate due to its metropolitan location, as he explained in his earlier interviews.

Montell’s career changes were also synced with his coming out process. He mostly kept his sexual identity secret at work until he decided to come out in the current workplace. In earlier interviews, he justified his nondisclosure status by saying that he needed to be “professional” at work. However, after joining the current firm where he could “finally be himself,” he revised his narrative by describing his previous workplaces more negatively (e.g., “not accepting,” “have to live a certain lifestyle”) than he did when he was working for those places. By doing so, he crafted a story of progressive trajectory: he liberated himself from heteronormative workplaces and achieved his true self. In this sense, his uplifting narrative drew on the U.S. gay pride discourse, which has encouraged gay people to come out to be “true” to themselves (Armstrong 2002).

Race also played an important role in Montell’s career narrative. He mentioned in his earlier interviews that coming out was especially difficult for him because he was a Black gay man. He said,

As time has progressed, it’s become okay to be gay, but it’s more so across the White or Latino spectrum. But you don’t really see many gay, Black males coming out. It’s okay for girls, but it’s not okay for men, socially.

About coming out at work, he also said, “Because I’m already Black, I want to be perceived as a professional person first and a Black gay male second. So, I want my work and my work ethic to speak for itself rather than my lifestyle choice.” These comments indicated that it was particularly difficult for him as a Black gay man to find a workplace that allowed him to be open about his sexual identity. The series of his career changes made sense in this context. Jonathon, a Black pansexual man, reported a similar story: while working as an assistant director of diversity and inclusion (DI) in a university, his application for promotion was denied because the higher administration perceived him as unprofessional because of his openly pansexual identity and body piercing, according to Jonathon. The incident shocked him because he had received support from his immediate supervisor and colleagues regarding his promotion. This incident led him to leave the university. Montell’s and Jonathon’s stories resonated with past research documenting that Black nonheterosexual men are subject to unique stereotypes (Calabrese et al. 2018). Because of the nature of our data, we cannot determine the extents to which the employers’ denials of promotions reflected their reactions to Montell’s and Jonathon’s sexual identities. Nonetheless, what is important for the current narrative analysis of career plan changes is that those participants believed that discrimination was the primary reason for not getting promoted and that they left the employers because of it.

Annie (a White queer, nonbinary person) also changed their career plans because of their experiences of workplace heteronormativity and cisnormativity, but their increasing desire to escape a heteronormative, cisnormative workplace was linked with their changing responsibilities at work and at home. When we first interviewed Annie, they were still a college student and expressed strong interest in working for a nonprofit organization to help reduce social inequalities as a nonbinary, queer person with feminist values. However, they decided to take a job at a state government after college graduation because they needed stable income and a fixed work schedule that would allow them to take care of two aging family members, and subsequently, a new-born baby. Thus, the financial needs forced them to give up a career inspired by their nonbinary, queer identity (i.e., a nonprofit job).

While working for the state government, Annie felt frustrated with the heteronormative, cisnormative climate but had to stay on the job because of their financial needs and caretaking responsibilities at home. However, after spending eight years in the workplace and getting promoted to a managerial position, they finally decided to leave the state government. They explained,

Some of the conservative policies that I had been asked to write and the initiatives that I was being asked to support . . . I was no longer comfortable doing. Previously, I had been far enough down the food chain in the state government that it didn’t matter so much. And then, I got too far along in my career, and it started to matter more, and I had to be in meetings with the new secretary of the agency. I had to keep my mouth shut, and I had to be so thoughtful about how I was talking and how I was presenting myself, and it just became exhausting. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Annie also faced increasing pressures from their colleagues to suppress their gender and sexual identities. They explained,

My general feeling of not being able to be myself in my position was a big part of why I left the job. Being gender queer and having a queer sexuality was always something that I felt like I had to tuck away. I had to wear lots of makeup and wear high heels. If you don’t, then you’re not taken seriously, or you are never going to advance, or they won’t invite you to the big meetings.

Thus, the workplace heteronormativity and cisnormativity became unbearable as they got promoted and experienced stronger expectations to downplay their gender and sexual identities, especially when they faced pressures to endorse conservative policies, which Annie viewed as incompatible with their gender and sexual identities. About the same time, their mother and grandfather passed away, which reinforced their decision to leave the state government because it reduced their financial needs and caretaking responsibilities. For these reasons, they decided to return to their initial career plan and started to apply for nonprofit jobs, including LGBTQ organizations. Annie was one of only two participants who had children and the only participant who took care of aging family members. Their story shows that caretaking responsibilities greatly affected their ability to escape heteronormative and cisnormative careers.

In sum, unanticipated experiences of workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity compelled some LGBTQ workers to shift their careers. They did not anticipate these problems before going into the fields for a few reasons. First, many participants initially believed that LGBTQ identities were no longer stigmatized in society (Ueno et al. 2018). Second, because of their no or very short work histories, they had limited knowledge about the LGBTQ climates in the industries and workplaces that they sought to enter. Third, LGBTQ identities became an issue only when they went up for promotions. Fourth, after promotions, employers and supervisors exerted greater pressures on LGBTQ workers to downplay their sexual and gender identities.

By discussing these examples, we do not intend to give the impression that experiences of discrimination and workplace heteronormativity and cisnormativity always led to career plan changes. Some participants did not change their plans. For example, we mentioned above that Annie could not leave their state government job for several years because of their financial needs and caretaking responsibilities. Other participants also explained that it was more important to stay on the careers in which they had invested their time and effort than starting out a new career in a more LGBTQ-friendly industry.

Burnout and Disengagement of LGBTQ Identities from Career Plans

Some LGBTQ workers initially entered career paths that allowed them to be open about their sexual and gender identities and use their identities as a source of inspiration and motivation for their careers. After spending some time working for those jobs, they decided to exit because they experienced emotional burnout and other challenges that they did not anticipate initially. These cases represented LGBTQ workers’ disengagement of their sexual and gender identities from career plans.

For example, Jonathon (a Black pansexual man) worked in universities as an assistant director of DI and subsequently in a large private corporation as a DI training manager. In an early interview, he explained that being a queer person of color had motivated him to go into the DI field because “I want to be able to advocate for students in marginalized spaces.” He also anticipated his advantages in the field:

There is a perception that as a queer person and as a person of color, I must just know things, which is of course not the case, but it will benefit me. By hiring me, some places would be killing two birds with one stone because I’m a minority in multiple ways.

Thus, he was optimistic about his career prospect in the DI field.

However, after spending some time in the field, he started to encounter challenges that he did not anticipate initially. He explained,

There were different times where I proposed a training or an initiative and got a lot of pushbacks or questioning in ways that my counterparts in leadership development or student wellness don’t get questioned. There is just a different level of trepidation and weariness around the [DI] work, having to explain why some of these things are worthwhile or necessary or having my expertise or experience almost called into question. Those situations are draining for me.

He believed that his colleagues questioned his proposals partly because of his identity as a queer person of color. He said,

People tend to assume that I would assert and bring certain things up because of my own experiences and not because of the amount of reading that I do about these topics or other professional development that I’ve undergone. I have to almost anticipate that and be able to bring in literature and research to back up what I’m saying. . . . It’s exhausting as someone who has a lot of the identities that we’re trying to enhance experiences for. . . . Sharing personal experiences on a regular basis is very draining.

Thus, colleagues’ reactions to his identity as a queer person of color created unique challenges in his career, contrary to his initial belief that his double minority status would work for his advantage. Furthermore, the work was emotionally draining because it was personally relevant to his sexual and racial identities, contrary to his earlier assumption that holding multiple minority identities would help him sustain motivation for the career. Facing the challenges, he was planning to leave the current job within a few years, when we talked to him in the latest interview. His experience of burnout echoed previous research on minority workers on DI jobs (Wingfield, Hordge-Freeman, and Smith-Lovin 2018), but the current results from longitudinal data additionally demonstrated implications for career plan changes; people may not necessarily anticipate emotional burnout when choosing DI careers, and experiences of burnout may cause them to exit the careers. Jonathon’s comments also show that this tendency may be stronger for workers who hold multiple marginalized identities.

Similar to Jonathon, Mario (a Latinx gay man) experienced burnout in a career that had allowed him to integrate his gay identity into work, but he did not feel he could change his career plan. In early interviews, he explained that he wanted to become a mental health counselor because he benefited from seeing a counselor when coming out in adolescence. He said, “I want to be there for people that want to do the same thing as I went through.” He believed that counseling was a safe environment for LGBTQ workers because it was “an open, safe environment for diverse populations.”

However, when he started to work as a counselor, he encountered many challenges that he had not anticipated, including sexuality-based harassment from both colleagues and clients. In his most recent interview, he expressed a feeling of burnout and reported conflicting thoughts about staying in the counseling field:

I can definitely feel myself burning out, and I have to frequently take days off for my own mental health. I constantly feel like I’m struggling to help other people, and I’m not really getting that much help. There have been times I’ve considered just selecting a different job, but I feel obligated to stay in the [counseling] field, because of the amount of time and money I’ve invested into my degree and the field experience that I have done so far. And I don’t really know what else I would do. I have no experience aside from counseling. So, venturing out is kind of scary.

As seen in this example, not all LGBTQ workers who felt burnt out were able to leave their LGBTQ-inspired jobs because they had invested substantial amounts of time into the careers or because they did not have resources, such as work skills and experiences, to move to different careers. Although they did not change their career plans, they felt substantially less confident about their careers. Previous research showed that LGBTQ people choose certain occupations to pursue interests that relate to their LGBTQ identities (Schneider and Dimito 2010; Tilcsik et al. 2015). The present results show, however, that those who enter these occupations are not necessarily satisfied with their careers.

Career Cooling Out and Increasing Emphasis on LGBTQ Community Involvement

So far, we have discussed career plan changes that indicated LGBTQ workers’ increasing and decreasing engagement of their sexual and gender identities in their careers. In another set of cases, participants did not change their levels of identity engagement, but they changed their career priorities, relative to their personal lives as LGBTQ persons. Specifically, participants initially prioritized their occupational careers, but they came to emphasize the importance of their involvement with local LGBTQ communities in their personal lives. In this process, they scaled down their career plans, and some of them relocated across states for bigger local LGBTQ communities even though relocation limited their career opportunities. In these career changes, participants believed that occupational careers and participation in LGBTQ communities created competing demands that they needed to “balance.”

Some participants, gay men in particular, came to value their personal lives outside work when they became committed to their intimate relationships, and they became less ambitious in their career plans. Blake (a White gay man) was one of the participants who reported such changes. He started his career in the finance industry, and by his third interview, he had been promoted to a human resource trainer for a regional bank and developed an ambitious career plan to work at a headquarter office of a large credit card company in New York. During that period, he only had short-term intimate relationships and moved across cities twice to seek better job opportunities.

Blake’s strategy for career advancement changed when he met his current partner and discussed their future plans together. He explained,

My partner and I made a conscious decision to say, “What are we more in pursuit of? Is it living somewhere we want to live or working on a career that takes us no matter what city we go to?” And we said that it was more important to live somewhere we loved.

They decided to settle down in a metropolitan area in the Southeast “because we have more gay friends in the area than any other cities. . . . The city is a nationally ranked for LGBT inclusion.” Thus, meeting the current partner increased Blake’s desire to settle down in a city where he and his partner could enjoy their life together as a same-sex couple. As a consequence, he had to compromise his career opportunities by finding jobs within their destination city, and he was no longer interested in working for the credit card company in New York. Past research reported that straight women scale down their career plans or leave the labor market completely to spend more time with family as they get married and raise children, whereas men tend to sustain their career plans (Cha 2010; Clarkberg and Moen 2001; Moen and Yu 2000; Shu and Marini 2008). The current results show that some gay couples scale down their career plans in ways more similar to straight women than to straight men.

By discussing Blake’s case, we do not intend to suggest that all partnered gay men reported increasing desires to settle down and declining career ambitions. In fact, some gay men (and bisexual men who had men partners) continued to seek career opportunities while living separately from their partners. However, when gay men entered new committed relationships, some of them reduced their career ambitions and increased their interest in living in gay-friendly cities.

Among our participants, women in intimate relationships, regardless of their partners’ gender, did not show this trend of relocating to LGBTQ-friendly cities and scaling down their career plans. There are a few possible explanations for this result. First, many women participants were already in committed relationships in very early career stages and had been negotiating their careers and relationships. Therefore, they did not experience substantial changes in their emphasis on intimate relationships and career balance over time. Second, women participants might not have afforded to compromise their career opportunities by relocating, because of their labor market disadvantages relative to men (World Economic Forum 2019). This interpretation is consistent with the argument that men in same-sex relationships can afford to consider non-economic factors such as their personal interests and work conditions in their career decisions because both partners experience wage premiums as men (Berg and Lien 2002; Cerf 2016). Third, women participants might not have benefited much from relocating to cities with large LGBTQ communities, which tend to emphasize gay men’s interests over others’ (Mattson 2023). This interpretation is compatible with another pattern that emerged in the data: bisexual and pansexual men in the sample who became committed to intimate relationships also did not report increasing desire to participate in the LGBTQ community.

For gay men like Blake, increasing commitment to an intimate relationship was the main reason to relocate to a gay-friendly city and scale down their career plans, but another gay participant, Montell reported a similar change in work-life balance although he was not in a committed relationship. We mentioned earlier that his experiences of workplace discrimination and heteronormativity motivated him to change careers. After moving to the current consulting company, he finally started to feel comfortable disclosing his sexuality and “being himself,” and he planned to stay in the firm and move up within the firm. In his most recent interview, however, he reported that he started to view this career differently. He said,

[The current job] pays the bills, but again, am I fulfilling my purpose? Is this something that I am passionate about? I am not. I just want to have that work-life balance all around. . . . I’m in a very small city, and there’s not really an LGBT community here. I’m interested in getting back in a big city where they have an LGBT community. . . . I want to stay with consulting and join an organization on the side where I am able to do something that is meaningful to me. . . . I don’t think there are any role models for Black gay men, so I feel like I should be able to be a role model for somebody coming up and be a mentor for individuals that are like me. If I was in a city that had a larger community, I would be able to be more valuable to people like me.

Thus, because of his declining interest in work, Montell came to see his career mainly as a means to pay bills, became less ambitious in his career, and started to think about improving his work-life balance by getting more involved in the LGBTQ community. In other words, his career cooling-out process coincided with his increasing importance of gay identity in his life. This result is notable, given the “postcloset” discourse, which has emerged in recent years and emphasized that nonheterosexuality is no longer stigmatized and does not strongly impact LGBTQ people’s lives (Seidman 2002). Contrary to the discourse, at least some LGBTQ people like Blake and Montell continued to find their life meaning in the LGBTQ community.

Discussion

Over the course of the study, many young LGBTQ workers changed their career plans. These changes showed some commonalities with those previously reported for the broader young adult population, such as cooling out and floundering (Cech 2021; McClelland 1990; Mortimer and Fischer 2017). However, LGBTQ young adults’ reasons for plan changes were intertwined with their sexual and gender identities in three ways, and each type of changes had important implications for occupational segregation and disparities between LGBTQ and straight, cisgender workers.

First, some participants experienced discrimination or heteronormativity and cisnormativity in the current workplaces and decided to switch to other careers that they perceived as more LGBTQ friendly. These career changes not only undermined their autonomy in career planning but also threatened their financial prospects, especially among those who had chosen their initial careers to ensure financial security (e.g., health insurance, state government jobs). Furthermore, LGBTQ workers who had to change careers were unable to make use of the education and the training that they had completed as well as the skills and experiences that they had accumulated in their initial careers. Some of them had to go back to school to start a new career, thus bearing additional financial and time costs.

Past research showed that early career disruptions undermine wage trajectories (Fuller 2008; Krahn et al. 2015), and the current results suggest that workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity may impose financial penalties to LGBTQ workers by forcing them to change their careers. In fact, the existing literature shows that gay and bisexual men receive wage penalties (Badgett et al. 2019, 2021; Ciprikis et al. 2020) and that bisexual women and transgender people have high rates of poverty (Badgett et al. 2019). The present results suggest that career plan adjustments to workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity may operate as a worker-level mechanism that contributes to these labor market disparities. It is important to note that some LGBTQ workers who experienced workplace discrimination and heteronormativity and cisnormativity decided to stay on their current career paths to avoid these negative consequences of career changes. However, they had to continue facing the same challenges in their workplaces, which may harm their mental health in the long run (Waldo 1999). In addition to these consequences for LGBTQ workers, their career changes may create costs to employers: they lose talented employees and reduce diversity, which in turn undermines firm productivity (Pichler et al. 2018). At the societal level, LGBTQ workers’ decisions to move to industries and firms that they perceive as more LGBTQ-friendly exacerbate their segregation from straight, cisgender workers (Tilcsik et al. 2015; Ueno et al. 2013).

Second, some participants started careers that allowed them to integrate their LGBTQ identities into work (e.g., DI, counseling), but they were planning to exit those careers because the work had emotionally drained them over time. These participants came to view their LGBTQ identities as constraints on their careers, showing drastic shifts from their optimistic views in adolescence and emerging adulthood. The emotional burnout represented an unanticipated cost to LGBTQ workers in their identity-inspired careers. As people with marginalized identities, these workers offered unique knowledge and skills to help their work organizations and society as a whole, but they experienced career penalties because of those identities and did not receive sufficient support from employers who expected these contributions. These LGBTQ workers’ career transitions represented losses to the organizations, the industries, and society as a whole because their skills and talents were no longer used to increase DI and reduce inequalities.

Third, gay men decided to scale down their career plans as they increased their involvement with the LGBTQ community. These changes resulted from an emerging feeling of meaninglessness at work and, for some, their growing desire to settle down with their partners. This result shows that some gay men’s career cooling-out process is intertwined with their desire for LGBTQ community engagement that increases with age. The result extends the literature on cooling out (McClelland 1990; Shu and Marini 2008), which has paid little attention to LGBTQ workers. This type of career plan change also has important implications for segregation and disparities between LGBTQ and straight, cisgender workers. Because there are a limited number of gay-friendly cities, gay men had to compromise their career opportunities to increase their participation in local gay communities. Furthermore, although their relocation may enrich their social lives at the individual level, it exacerbates the geographical segregation between gay men and other people.

These gay men drew on the concept of work-life balance and explained that their “life” outside work included their engagement with the LGBTQ community, which embedded their “family of choice” (Weston 1991). The results extend the existing literature on work-life balance, which assumes heterosexuality and cisgender and concentrates on marriage and parenting as “life” (Sawyer, Thoroughgood, and Ladge 2017). The narrow conceptualization of work-life balance may lead scholars, employers, and policy makers to overlook LGBTQ workers’ unmet needs for work-life balance. This point adds to the emerging critique of the work-life balance literature from LGBTQ perspectives. For example, Sawyer, Thoroughgood, and Cleveland (2014) pointed out that LGBTQ workers’ needs for work-life balance remain unrecognized when hostile workplace climates prevent them from disclosing their identities, and Dixon and Dougherty (2014) argued that LGBTQ workers feel hesitant to take time for their family members because LGBTQ families do not receive the same level of respect as straight and cisgender families.

The sample overrepresented educated LGBTQ workers, and the current results may show better scenarios than those experienced by less educated LGBTQ workers because their high education levels may have provided greater ability to escape heteronormative and cisnormative workplaces. For example, they may have had more options for their new careers. Although they were still in their young adulthood, they may also have had more accumulated wealth (and less debt) than those with lower levels of education, which may have allowed gaps in employment, retraining for new careers, and relocations. These factors may have facilitated career changes among highly educated participants. However, it is also important to recognize that some highly educated participants who went through long periods of training felt stuck in their careers because they have invested more time and money in specialized careers (see Mario’s example).

The longitudinal study design was crucial for uncovering these results. The design allowed us to collect detailed information about the ongoing career planning process without relying on retrospective reports. Previous studies that examined LGBTQ people’s career plans in adolescence or emerging adulthood failed to address their entries into career paths (e.g., Schneider and Dimito 2010), and studies that focused on LGBTQ people’s workplace experiences did not address the implications for career plan changes (e.g., Giuffre et al. 2008; Rumens and Kerfoot 2009). Similarly, studies that documented LGBTQ workers’ concentrations in certain industries made assumptions about how they decided to enter those industries, but the studies could not directly demonstrate these assumptions (e.g., Tilcsik et al. 2015). The longitudinal design in the present study helped reduce these limitations.

Similarly, the narrative approach was useful for understanding how LGBTQ workers interpreted their workplace experiences and how they made decisions about changing their careers. However, because of the methodological approach and the lack of comparative sample of straight, cisgender workers, the present study could not address factors that affected LGBTQ workers’ career plan changes if they took for granted or overlooked those factors. For example, economists have argued that gay, bisexual, and queer men in same-sex relationships do not experience the same level of economic pressure to sustain their earnings as straight men in heterosexual relationships because they are less likely to have children and because both they and their partners (i.e., men) experience earning privileges relative to women (Aksoy, Carpenter, and Frank 2018). Lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in same-sex relationship may be more likely than the straight counterpart to choose demanding but high-paying careers because they are less likely have children, (although they also face greater needs for such careers because both they and their partners experience wage penalties as women). These processes may have been operating among our participants, but they were not part of their career narratives, perhaps because they took these relative privileges for granted or because they felt that career disadvantages they experienced as LGBTQ workers affected their careers more strongly than those relative privileges.

Limitations

The study has several limitations that need to be addressed in future research. First, the study included only one transgender woman and no transgender men although some participants identified as nonbinary. These gender expansive workers are frequent targets of workplace harassment and microaggression, and cisnormativity persists in U.S. workplaces and marginalizes these workers (Jones 2023; Schilt and Connell 2007). Future research needs to examine whether and how those experiences contribute to gender expansive workers’ career plan changes.

Second, sexual and gender identities change over time, and those changes may motivate career plan adjustments. Relatedly, some participants reported other forms of changes related to gender and sexuality, such as gender affirming surgeries and transitions between same-sex and different-sex intimate relationships. Career implications for these changes deserve space for separate articles. Third, the study recruited participants who lived in a midsize, Southeastern city, and many participants left the city after completing education, and some moved to different regions. LGBTQ workers may change their career plans in different ways, depending on where they complete education and where they seek postgraduate jobs.

Conclusions

Like other young adults, many LGBTQ young adults change their career plans after spending some time in the labor force, but their career plans are intertwined with their sexual and gender identities. Each form of change highlights young adulthood as an important life stage when occupational segregation and disparities emerge between LGBTQ and cisgender, straight workers. These results call for future research that will expand the analysis to later life stages. It is also important to examine how career plan changes that LGBTQ workers make in young adulthood may affect their work experiences and their attainment of long-term career goals in later life stages.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Koji Ueno

Author Biographies

Koji Ueno is a professor of sociology at Florida State University. His research examines the implications of LGBTQ status for career plans, labor outcomes, workplace experiences, friendships, and mental health in the United States and Japan. His projects have been supported by National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council and published in various journals, including Social Forces, Social Problems, Work and Occupations, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Rachael Dominguez is a sociology PhD student at Florida State University. Her research generally focuses on how marginalized populations navigate key life transitions and move through institutions. Her research has spanned a variety of related topics, including campus support programs for former foster care youth, career plans of LGBTQ+ individuals, and community building within online science, technology, mathematics, and engineering programs for girls of color.

Skyler Bastow is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Florida State University and a graduate research assistant at the Pepper Institute of Aging and Public Policy and the Department of Geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine. Their research focuses on the social inequalities among LGBTQ+ populations over the life course, especially concerning LGBTQ+ health, aging, and health care experiences, and has been published in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development.

Jason V. D’Amours is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Florida State University. His research program lies at the intersection of the sociology of sexualities, medical sociology, and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. His dissertation employs qualitative methods to explore the changing landscape of HIV prevention. In particular, his dissertation examines new methods of HIV prevention, such as multipurpose prevention technologies, with a focus on how inequality is implicated in the development, regulatory approval, and rollout of emerging HIV prevention technologies. He can be reached at jasonvdamours@gmail.com.

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