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The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.
Although many families strive to share these responsibilities, research has consistently found that mothers tend to shoulder a larger share of the work tied to their kids’ schooling. That includes not only attending school events or packing lunches, but also the less visible work of scheduling doctor appointments, signing up for after-school activities and responding to emails or calls from teachers and administrators.
We are economists who study gender and families. We wanted to understand whether schools themselves might unintentionally contribute to this imbalance by defaulting to contacting mothers more than fathers.
Economists and other social scientists have long recognized that mothers spend more time than fathers on childcare, even when both parents work full-time. And even though men have assumed more caretaking responsibilities over the past several decades, women still spend more time caring for their children and homes.
This gap matters, because the way child care is divvied up shapes much more than parents’ work schedules. It can contribute to chronic stress and burnout and influence how couples perceive fairness within their relationships.
It can also influence parents’ careers by affecting work hours, opportunities for advancement and how much they earn.
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.
Schools are only one source of child-related demands.
Previous research has shown that mothers are more likely than fathers to schedule doctor appointments, coordinate extracurricular activities and manage many of the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep family life running smoothly. These responsibilities are often described as the “mental load” of parenting, because they involve planning, monitoring and coordinating.
Our research suggests that schools and other organizations may unintentionally amplify that mental load by directing more requests toward mothers.
In surveys we conducted alongside our experiment, educators and other adults who regularly interact with families — including child-care providers, coaches and medical professionals — also reported contacting mothers more often than fathers.
One phone call may seem inconsequential. But over the course of a school year — and across doctor offices, sports teams, camps and other activities — those interruptions can add up. They become one more demand on parents’ time, and that demand disproportionately falls on mothers.
This perspective also helps explain why gender gaps in caregiving can persist even among couples who are trying to divide responsibilities more equally. The unequal distribution of parenting tasks is shaped not only by decisions within households, but also by expectations and routines outside the home.
Many schools allow families to specify whom to contact first or designate different contacts for different situations. As those routines are established at the start of the school year, making those preferences explicit may help school communication better reflect how each family chooses to share responsibilities.
Laura K. Gee, Kristy Buzard and Olga Stoddard are associate professors of economics at Tufts University, Syracuse University and Brigham Young University, respectively. This article was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The piece argues that as the school year begins, mothers continue to bear a disproportionate share of school-related responsibilities—buying supplies, tracking forms, arranging transportation and fielding emails and phone calls—on top of the “behind-the-scenes” tasks such as medical appointments and extracurricular sign-ups, a cluster of duties often described as the parenting “mental load.”[1][4]
Building on longstanding social science findings that mothers spend more time on childcare than fathers even when both work full time, the article contends this unequal division of labor affects stress levels, perceptions of fairness in relationships and parents’ careers, including work hours, promotion opportunities and earnings.[4]
The article highlights a large-scale field experiment in 2022 involving more than 80,000 K-12 principals nationwide, in which a fictitious two-parent family asked schools to call either the mother or the father; the authors report that when both parents appeared equally available, mothers were about 1.4 times more likely to receive the first call, with roughly 60% of callbacks going to mothers and 40% to fathers.[1][2]
At the same time, the piece explains that when fathers were explicitly described as more available, principals did shift more calls toward them, yet many schools still phoned mothers first, suggesting that even clear information about availability does not fully overcome entrenched expectations about who is the “default” parent.[1][2]
The article further notes that subtle cues in communication changed outcomes: if the father sent the email and copied the mother, schools were more likely to call him; however, mothers still received a substantial share of calls, reinforcing the idea that institutions implicitly treat mothers as the primary contact even when fathers take the initiative.[1][2]
While emphasizing that school staff may not be consciously discriminating, the piece suggests that administrators often make quick decisions based on past experience; if they have historically found mothers more responsive, calling mothers first can seem efficient, yet repeated micro-decisions across schools and other organizations quietly reinforce an unequal caregiving pattern.[1][2][4]
The column situates schools within a broader ecosystem of institutions—doctors’ offices, child-care providers, sports teams and camps—that often default to contacting mothers, arguing that this external “dial-mom” tendency amplifies mothers’ mental load and helps explain why gender gaps in caregiving persist even among couples trying to share responsibilities more equally.[1][2][4]
Finally, the article suggests that small institutional and household changes could help; many schools already allow families to specify contact preferences, and the piece proposes making those choices explicit—such as designating different first contacts for different situations—as a way to better align school communication with how each family wants to divide responsibilities.[1][2]
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the focus on institutional bias, one reported viewpoint from educators themselves, cited in coverage of the same research, is that principals often believe mothers are more available and that social norms cast mothers as more skilled at and more willing to handle school logistics; this perspective frames calling mothers first as a pragmatic response to perceived responsiveness and caregiving patterns rather than primarily as discrimination.[2]
Moreover, some analysts emphasize that informational signals can and do shift behavior: a New America commentary on the experiment notes that signaling fathers’ greater availability significantly increased the share of calls to fathers, suggesting to these observers that clearer communication and fathers’ proactive contact—while not a complete fix—remain meaningful tools families can use to redistribute school-related demands.[1][2]
At the same time, policy advocates focused on working families often frame increased school communication as part of the solution, not the problem; a Center for American Progress report urges districts to “reinvent” parent-teacher communication through more calls, texts and technology-enabled outreach as part of family-centered school models, prioritizing robust engagement over concerns about how that contact may be unequally distributed between mothers and fathers.[3]
Additionally, child development organizations stress the academic benefits of strong parent-school ties, encouraging parents to attend conferences, back-to-school nights and other events and to stay closely involved with their children’s schooling; because such guidance often highlights the importance of engagement without differentiating between mothers and fathers, it can implicitly validate high-contact parenting—even when that role is disproportionately filled by mothers.[5]
Finally, research on pandemic-era parenting has documented that many mothers themselves internalize expectations of being the primary caregiver and organize their work and family lives around that identity; this line of scholarship, while acknowledging institutional bias, underscores intra-family norms and personal choices, leading some commentators to focus more on renegotiating roles within households than on changing whom schools call first.[4]
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