Do transgender and non-binary workers in the U.S. retail and service sectors have lower quality jobs than their cisgender counterparts?

While several quantitative studies document significant gaps in wages between transgender and non-binary workers and their cisgender counterparts, and while qualitative work examines trans workers’ experiences across multiple dimensions of job quality, a fuller empirical testing of these theories has been constrained by a lack of data that 1) allows for detailed comparisons across gender identities, 2) contains detailed and varied measures of job quality, and 3) considers the decomposition of job quality gaps into within and between-employer components. In this study, we analyze employer-employee linked data from over 36,800 hourly retail and food service workers surveyed by the Shift Project, including 1341 transgender and non-binary respondents, along with detailed measures of job quality. We find substantial persistent inequalities in job quality persist between transgender/non- binary workers and their cisgender counterparts, even after accounting for demographic and human capital factors, alongside fixed effects for occupations and specific employers. These disparities are most pronounced in areas where employers have substantial discretion, such as scheduling instability, work-life conflict, and job satisfaction. While transgender women, transgender men, and non-binary people’s experiences of these job quality factors differed at times, none of these groups fared uniformly worse than the others.