Following ‘Frontiers in Psychology – Gender, Sex and Sexuality Studies‘ Gay fathers are still seen more negatively and judged more harshly than lesbian mothers. The work analyses 63 researches on gay and bisexual fathers.
CONCLUSION: Gay fathers are still seen more negatively and judged more harshly than lesbian mothers because society in general perceives them as undermining traditional gender roles. Consequently, gay men are perceived as being less capable of parenting well-adjusted children than are lesbians (McLeod et al., 1999; Herek, 2000;Wells, 2011). Conversely, according to Farr et al. (2010). Further evidence has highlighted that children of gay fathers may have even better outcomes than those of heterosexual parents in some psychological domains, namely less gender-stereotyped and less internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Goldberg et al., 2012b;Golombok et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2017). To date, most of what we know about the role of fathers in child development has been from research on heterosexual fathers parenting with mothers. Research on gay and bisexual fathers has given a particularly valuable opportunity to consider fatherhood per se in absence of motherhood.
Sources:
McLeod et al., 1999, Herek, 2000, Wells, 2011, Farr et al. 2010., Goldberg et al., 2012b, Golombok et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2017.