“Better call mom: Schools still see mothers as the default parent to contact,” co-authored by Associate Professor of Economics Kristy Buzard, was published in The Conversation. They discuss their research study “Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement,” that was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Following is an excerpt of the article in The Conversation:

In the summer of 2022, we conducted a nationwide field experiment involving more than 80,000 K-12 school principals across the United States. Schools received an email from a fictitious two-parent household with both a mother and father interested in enrolling a child. The email listed both parents, each with a phone number and asked the principal to call one of them.

Because we randomly varied the names and wording of the emails, we could isolate whether a parent’s gender influenced who received the callback.

It did.

When neither parent appeared more available than the other, mothers were about 1.4 times more likely than fathers to receive the first phone call. Among principals who called someone back, roughly 60% contacted the mother first and 40% contacted the father.

We also tested whether providing more information changed these patterns. When the email explicitly stated that the father had more availability to talk, principals became substantially more likely to call him. But even when fathers were presented as the more available parent, many schools still called mothers first.

Another subtle cue also mattered. If the father sent the email and copied the mother, schools were more likely to contact him. Yet even then, mothers continued to receive a substantial share of the calls.

These findings suggest that many schools still view mothers as the default parent to contact about their children, even when they are given information indicating that fathers are equally – or even more – available than mothers.

Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that school staff members are intentionally contacting mothers. School administrators often have limited information and make quick decisions based on experience. If they have historically found mothers to be more responsive, calling them first may seem like the most efficient choice.

But when similar decisions are repeated thousands of times across schools and other organizations, they can reinforce the unequal division of caregiving responsibilities that already exists within many families.