Institutional Barriers to Same-Sex Parenthood? Experimental Evidence from the Spanish Labour and Housing Markets

WIP Seminar

Tuesday, April 21
12:15 to 13:00
UNIL - Géopolis, Room 5799

Álvaro Suáez Vergne, Héctor Cebolla Boado, Isabel Lazaro Bueno, "Institutional Barriers to Same-Sex Parenthood? Experimental Evidence from the Spanish Labour and Housing Markets"     

Despite major legal advances in family recognition, same-sex couples may still face institutional barriers when forming families. Previous research has relied predominantly on observational data and has therefore been limited in its ability to identify how market-level discrimination shapes the conditions under which homoparental families are formed. To address this gap, we conducted two coordinated correspondence experiments in Spain (N = 6,654) across the labour and rental housing markets. By using sexual orientation and parental status as experimental treatments, we examine whether market gatekeepers—employers in the labour market and landlords in the rental housing market—respond differently to same-sex couples, and whether the presence of children modifies this treatment.

Our findings show that these institutional constraints are highly market-specific and not uniformly exclusionary. In the labour market, childless gay male applicants face a substantial callback penalty relative to heterosexual men, but this disadvantage is significantly attenuated when children are present, suggesting that parenthood may operate as a compensatory signal of normative conformity and stability. By contrast, in the housing market we find no baseline penalty associated with sexual orientation. Instead, we identify a parenthood penalty that falls on heterosexual couples, whereas same-sex couples with children are largely exempt from it. This pattern is consistent with the possibility that homoparental families are perceived as more socioeconomically stable or less risky in this context. Overall, the results show that parental status operates as a market-specific signal that reshapes how same-sex couples are evaluated, with important implications for understanding the institutional conditions under which same-sex parenthood becomes more or less feasible.