Doctors, lawyers, bankers, computer specialists, CEOs, CFOs, actors, singers, waiters, teachers, UPS drivers, clergy, pro sports figures and politicians — all careers in which we know we’re likely to find GLBT people.

But what about such fields as sanitation engineer, factory worker, construction worker, prison guard, arc welder, or, as portrayed in the popular series “Six Feet Under,” grave digger or funeral director?

As the saying goes, GLBT people are “everywhere,” and we are probably found in every occupation conceivable. Yet, to date, little statistical information has been collected on which fields it would appear gays and lesbians are more apt to enter — especially those holding jobs outside the corporate realm where employers are not likely to be tracked by GLBT organizations according to pro-gay work policies. Furthermore, it is not clear whether trends in social acceptance and workplace policies will have an effect on the career decisions of GLBT workers.

Still, there are organizations that attempt to make it easier for gays and lesbians to make informed decisions about where they shop and look for work. They also seek to dispel what many consider a damaging myth that gays and lesbians make more money and have more disposable income than their straight counterparts across the board.

There are also misconceptions about where the most gay-friendly work environments can be found. “It’s only been the last few years that the ad industry as a business has extended nondiscrimination polices and offered DP benefits to their gay employees,” noted Mike Wilke, a marketing specialist and founder of the Commercial Closet. “It’s really been a slow industry to respond. People would think as a creative industry they would be ahead of the curve, and they were the opposite.”

Kim Mills of the Human Rights Campaign’s Worknet web site said that while the HRC collects statistical data about “employers and their policies towards GLBT people,” they have little sense of which fields GLBT people are more likely to be entering into. “I know a lot of GLBT people will use [our web site] to make decisions about where they want to work or even where they want to shop, but we don’t attempt to do that analysis,” said Mills. “We have a ratings system that looks at whether companies have nondiscrimination polices, domestic partner benefits, if they advertise and if it’s respectful to our community, if they make contributions back [and whether] they’re doing anything that we can find that is antigay.

“This is a database of maybe 6,000 employers,” stressed Mills. “There are millions of employers in the United States that we don’t have data on.”

According to research conducted by Simmons Market Research Bureau, some 70 percent of gays and lesbians have at least a college education and work in professional and managerial jobs, while 57 percent are employed in leader sectors such as executive, managerial, high tech, sales/marketing, medial and educational fields. Simmons found roughly 48 percent are college educated, 22 percent hold graduate degrees and 21 percent of gay and lesbian households have an income greater than $100,000 per year, a greater household income than the average U.S. household income.

However, in a story published by the Gay Financial Network, “Gay Affluence Questioned Using 2000 Census Data,” much of this information was largely called into question.

According to an analysis of Census 2000 data by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan social and economic policy research group, it would appear that gay men actually make less than their straight counterparts, contradicting the stereotype that gay men have greater affluence than their straight counterparts, many with children and families to support.

However, some good news is that the report showed the income gap between straight and gay was less for states with laws protecting workers from employment discrimination based on sexual orientation (though California and San Diego both recently passed laws protecting transgender workers, in some 35 states it is still legal to fire someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity).

“These data suggest that when the fear of job-related discrimination is lifted, gay men perform on par or better than other American men in the workplace,” said David M. Smith, communications director and senior strategist of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, who commissioned the Institute’s study.

In addition, the Urban Institute found that gay men with lower levels of education fared worse than straight men with an equal lack of education.

“Given their limited job mobility, low-educated gay men are more likely to be working in discriminatory settings, so they reap the most benefits of anti-discrimination legislation. Educated workers have greater flexibility in their employment choices,” Gary Gates, of the Urban Institute’s Population Studies Center told the Gay Financial Network.

“[The myth that most gay men are wealthy] was heavily promoted by two different groups of people who are kind of odd bedfellows, one being the Christian right, who have used that image very effectively to say gay people don’t deserve civil rights protections,” said Lee Badgett, Ph.D., a labor economist at UC Berkley who focuses on race, gender, and sexual orientation in the labor market. “On the other side there are a bunch of people who are trying to sell marketing services to companies to advertise to the gay community. So they have kind of a vested interest in showing gay people as affluent. It’s a myth that’s been around in different forms, but most recently I think that’s what has generated the belief that gay men are so affluent.

“What I and other economists who have looked at this have found is that gay men have pretty consistently tended to earn less than heterosexual men,” Badgett continued. “Even when you look at people who have the same level of education, live in the same kinds of places and have the same experience they’re earning less, and that’s an indication of some kind of discrimination, I think. Lesbians, on the other hand, tend to do better than heterosexual women, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no discrimination. It might just mean that lesbians are different in ways that are attractive to employers — maybe they’re more stable in jobs or have more experience than straight women. Lesbians make female salaries, and women in the U.S. still earn quite a bit less than men do.”

“I think partly because of competition for workers in certain kinds of fields, domestic partner benefits have spread much more rapidly in some industries,” said Badgett. “For instance, lots of law firms have domestic partner benefits. Lots of high tech sector companies, computer manufacturers, software manufacturers have domestic partner benefits. Insurance companies, newspapers, universities – these are all places that are pretty rapidly including gay people in their benefits packages. So that suggests that careers in those industries might be particularly gay-friendly.”

In fact, the HRC Foundation’s WorkNet project recently reported that more cities and counties enacted laws in 2002 prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity than in any previous year, while 20 more Fortune 500 companies, including Pfizer Inc.; Procter & Gamble Co.; Sears, Roebuck Co.; and Raytheon Co., began offering health insurance benefits to domestic partners last year, bringing the total to 169.

At the same time, the number of employers offering domestic partner health insurance benefits grew by 16 percent in 2002, while the number of employers instituting sexual orientation non-discrimination policies rose seven percent.

The HRC Corporate Equality Index examines 250 companies from the Fortune 500 or the Forbes 200 largest privately held businesses, rating them on a scale of 0 percent to 100 percent on seven factors, including: having a written non-discrimination policy covering sexual orientation; having a written non-discrimination policy covering gender identity and/or expression; offering health insurance coverage to employees’ same-sex domestic partners; offering diversity training; having GLBT employee groups; engaging in appropriate and respectful advertising to the GLBT community; providing financial contributions to GLBT community organizations; and declining to engage in any activities that would undermine the goal of equal rights for the GLBT community.

Worth noting is the fact that not a single company scored zero in 2003, and Lockheed Martin Corp. — which received a zero in 2002 — jumped to 71 percent after complying with a shareholder resolution asking it to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy, then adding domestic partner benefits as well.

Eighty companies have improved their score since the 2002 ranking, while the median score for 2003 was 71 percent, an increase of 14 percent over 2002.

“While some of these changes may be motivated by altruism, most business decisions come down to dollars and cents,” said Daryl Herrschaft, deputy director of WorkNet. “The positive movement in the index says that being fair to GLBT Americans, whether it involves employee benefits or respectful advertising campaigns, is the best way to do business.”

Most companies have written nondiscrimination policies that include sexual orientation and a large majority – nearly 75 percent – offer diversity training. The notable weak point remains gender identity protection. Fewer than 10 percent of the companies studied include gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies. However, the number has increased significantly over last year.

“What we see this year is improvement in every category measured, from written non-discrimination policies to domestic partner health insurance benefits and beyond,” said Mills. “Corporate America continues to be a leader in the quest for GLBT civil rights.… Employers of all types — public and private — are coming to the realization that their gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees deserve to be treated equally, and that to do so is good business.”

Another good indication of progress is the backlash within the anti-GLBT community.

One group that lobbies against gay rights, the Family Research Council, stated that there’s “no question [the GLBT community has] made some gains, but we’re not giving up the fight.”

Peter Sprigg, director of the FRC’s Center for Marriage and Family Studies, in an interview with The Washington Post, said that, “We believe this is a result of intense political pressure by pro-homosexual activists, but these laws are built on a false premise that sexual orientation is a characteristic like race or sex, and it simply isn’t true.”

There is little hard data available on what career fields the GLBT community tends to choose. After a fair amount of digging you’ll find that gay men are more likely to choose white collar jobs over blue collar, but you’re not going to discover whether they prefer to become doctors, lawyers or accountants. As for lesbians, there seems to be even less information available.

Trying to determine what careers would be more likely to welcome the GLBT community is also difficult.

“Assessing how tolerant a career is is a tough question,” said Badgett. “If you look at data on attitudes of gay people, the kinds of things that would show up would be wanting to get a college degree so you could work with other college-educated people because people with higher levels of education tend to be more tolerant towards gay people. Maybe looking for jobs that would put you in gay-friendly parts of the country or gay-friendly cities. Working in the high-tech sector, for instance — those are all big urban type areas that are going to have lots of amenities for gay people, a big gay community and probably more tolerance than average employers.

According to Badgett, GLBT job seekers are facing many of the same questions as their straight counterparts, including finding what they’re interested in, finding where that fits in with their family life, and finding work that has some potential for advancement. The discrimination component is really what distinguishes the experience of the GLBT community — the reality of wondering whether you will be paid less just because you’re not straight, whether or not you’re less likely to get a promotion, whether or not you’re going to be treated fairly in terms of benefits compensation.

“It’s always going to be uneven, I think, but overall the trend is quite clear that things are getting better,” Badgett concluded. “If you measure by both the number of employers who have policies that say [they] won’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and who have domestic partner benefits, the numbers have continued to grow every year — even in a recession. That’s a pretty good indication that it wasn’t just the flush ‘90s, when everybody said, ‘We’ve got to do a better job of attracting employees.…’ The fact that companies are still changing these policies — that companies like WalMart are changing policies — some of the most conservative corporate citizens are saying, ‘Yes, we will treat gay employees fairly.’ That’s a pretty powerful sign of change.”