Sexual Orientation and Multiple Job Holding

We use Swedish administrative data from 2001-2021 to study sexual orientation and multiple job holding. We identify over 19,000 employed individuals who ever entered a legal same-sex union and compare their outcomes with all employed individuals who were only ever in different-sex unions. We find that sexual minority individuals are significantly more likely than otherwise similar heterosexual individuals to hold multiple jobs. We explore four mechanisms: financial constraints, self-insurance, career mobility, and job heterogeneity. We find evidence in line with self-insurance mechanisms for sexual minority men. For women, we find that career mobility is a likely explanation.