Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, stay-at-home fathers attempting to re-enter the paid workforce faced greater social and economic penalties from employers than their mother counterparts. How did Covid-19 affect employers’ perceptions of stay-at-home fathers? The unprecedented childcare challenges posed by the pandemic and the resulting dramatic increase in stay-at-home parents of both genders received substantial media attention. Consequently, employers’ normative beliefs about the appropriate roles of women (as caregivers) and men (as breadwinners) may have shifted throughout this period. We leverage unique data from an online survey experiment capturing employers’ evaluations of stay-at-home mother and father applicants in 2019 (before the pandemic) and again in 2021 (during the height of the pandemic). Results show that approximately one year from pandemic onset, penalties against longtime stay-at-home fathers relative to equally qualified stay-at-home mothers diminished to the point where they were no longer statistically significant. Even more surprising, employers now expressed a greater preference for hiring fathers who demonstrated the most need for help re-entering the workforce compared to those mothers and fathers who demonstrated the least. These findings shed light on how the pandemic altered gendered norms around work and family, and raise questions about the durability of widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender.
