Posted by anderc8 on Tuesday, October 24, 2017 in News, TIPs 2017.

Written by Stephanie Wang, Vanderbilt Class of 2021

As a way to introduce you to faculty from the LGBT Policy Lab, first-year student Stephanie Wang will interview a different faculty member approximately each month and write a brief faculty profile. Stephanie reached out to the Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab prior to her arrival on campus this fall, as she is passionate about the issues being addressed in the TIPS project. Stephanie arrived at Vanderbilt from Pittsburgh, where she was active in a political activism organization, a robotics team, the varsity swim team as well as several writing publications. She plans to major in Computer Science.  At Vanderbilt, she writes for the Hustler, the Slant and the Vanderbilt Political Review. She is also involved with the Engineering Council and the Community Building, Outreach and Diversity Committee of Vanderbilt Student Government.  

To inform each Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab faculty profile, Stephanie is asking a range of questions, such as: What is the faculty member’s background? How did the faculty member become interested in research on LGBT public policies? How are LGBT issues treated in the faculty member’s broader academic discipline? To kick things off, here is Stephanie’s profile of LGBT Policy Lab Director Christopher “Kitt” Carpenter (Professor of Economics):

Involved with LGBT research ever since a conference in graduate school, Professor Carpenter, an economics professor specializing in health economics, has been involved with a variety of projects investigating societal, economic and health differences between LGBT and heterosexual individuals.

With past projects studying whether earnings of gay individuals differed from those of heterosexual individuals controlling for all other factors, Professor Carpenter’s current research project through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also links public policy. Professor Carpenter is studying how public policy, such as the legalization of gay marriage, impacts health and health outcomes for LGBT individuals and their families. Influenced by what happened in North Carolina with HB2, Professor Carpenter is also studying how anti-LGBT laws (such as transgender bathroom bills) impact local economic activity by using county business patterns, unemployment rates and quarterly census of wages and employment from different sectors and industries. Carpenter and his team are also studying the impact that the legalization of same-sex marriage has had on the health insurance offered by employers to LGBT individuals.

In the future, Professor Carpenter anticipates studying how LGBT policies like marriage equality impacted LGBT individuals in Europe, to determine whether attitudes caused marriage equality or if marriage equality caused attitudes. He’s also hoping to look at Google trends in the US for traditionally homophobic words as a way to measure overt measures of homophobia, hoping to understand if overt measures of homophobia changed with public policy. In Canada, Professor Carpenter is conducting a resume experiment to understand the nature of discrimination by sending real employers two fake resumes, the only difference being that one applicant could reasonably be assumed to be gay based on extracurricular interests and activities. By testing this in different kinds of industries, for both men and women, and in Canada where people believe is generally more liberal than the United States, Professor Carpenter is hoping to gain more insight into the hiring process as it pertains to LGBT individuals versus heterosexual individuals.

Professor Carpenter hopes that this well-needed research will guide decision making and policy, provide objective evidence for future Supreme Court cases, and show the tangible cost of reversing marriage equality.

“I see very clearly how rights affect people’s mental well-being, physical well-being and financial well-being, and how erosion of rights negatively affects that. At heart, I’m a researcher and a scientist and I want to bring in the most rigorous evidence to bear on these questions,” says Professor Carpenter.

For more information, please read Stephanie’s related article in the Vanderbilt Political Review.