Spain has become an international reference point in the design of egalitarian work–family policies. Between 2017 and 2021, the country introduced one of the world’s most generous parental-leave schemes, granting fathers an individual, fully paid, non-transferable entitlement equal to mothers’. This rapid expansion has been widely heralded as a transformative step toward dismantling gendered divisions of care and reducing long-standing penalties associated with motherhood. Yet a core but understudied question remains: Do employers respond differently to mothers and fathers once caregiving rights have been equalized by law? And equally important, are these effects uniform across a segmented labor market?

To answer these questions, we present the design and preliminary insights of a large-scale correspondence test conducted in 2025 in Barcelona and Madrid. We sent 2,033 fictitious applications to real job openings across eleven occupations that vary in gender composition, skill requirements, and contract stability. The experiment identifies two forms of discrimination: (1) penalties associated with the caregiving burden (comparing applicants with two children to otherwise identical applicants with one child and to single parents with no children), and (2) penalties associated with higher probability of having a child (comparing married applicants without children and married applicants with one child to singles and parents with two children). These comparisons are made separately for men and women, allowing us to assess whether gendered expectations about caregiving persist when parental entitlements have been made symmetrical.

The main results reveal that parental leave equalization has not eliminated gendered hiring inequalities. We find a clear and substantive motherhood penalty: once candidates have children, women receive fewer callbacks than men. The penalty is not uniform, however. Women with a single young child receive substantially fewer responses than childless women, and the lowest callback rate in the entire experiment corresponds to single mothers with two children, whose probability of employer response is roughly 60% lower than that of equivalent single fathers—a statistically significant gap.

By contrast, men experience no penalties for parenthood. Across all male profiles—including married fathers, fathers of two, and even single fathers with high visible care burdens—callback rates remain flat and statistically indistinguishable from childless men. In fact, some fatherhood profiles show slightly higher response rates, consistent with the persistence of a “fatherhood premium.” The main effects therefore indicate a gender-asymmetric pattern: employers discount mothers, especially those with greater caregiving responsibilities, while treating fathers’ parental status as neutral or even positive.

We also examine whether these patterns vary across labor-market segments. Although interaction terms rarely reach statistical significance due to cell sizes, the descriptive and modeled patterns converge: penalties for mothers tend to be stronger in feminized and lower-education sectors, whereas male applicants remain unaffected across sectors. This suggests that equal parental leave rights may be least effective in environments where precariousness or rigid expectations of availability are strongest.

A unique contribution of this project is that all results will be directly compared to a pre-reform correspondence test conducted before Spain expanded fathers’ leave rights (González et al. 2019). These comparative analyses—currently pending—will allow us to assess whether the reform has attenuated, reproduced, or unintentionally reconfigured employers’ discriminatory behavior. Without the pre-reform comparison, policy effects cannot be fully interpreted; thus, the conference paper will incorporate those analyses.

Together, preliminary results indicate that equalizing parental leave rights is not sufficient to eliminate the motherhood penalty, nor to generate systematic penalties for fatherhood. Instead, the reform appears to coexist with entrenched organizational norms that differentially interpret caregiving by mothers and fathers. The research speaks to debates on institutional design, gender norms, and labor-market segmentation, offering timely evidence on the limits of formal equality in transforming the gendered foundations of work and family.