Despite decades of social and policy change aimed at achieving gender equality, mothers continue to shoulder the majority of childcare responsibilities even in dual-earner households. Recent economics Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin documents how persistent disparities in caregiving contribute to gender gaps in earnings, labour force participation, and career advancement (Goldin 2021). Policymakers have introduced paid parental leave, subsidised childcare, and flexible work arrangements to better balance labour market outcomes between women and men. Yet one persistent and often overlooked source of gender inequality originates not within households or workplaces, but from institutions outside the home: schools, sports teams, doctors’ offices, and other child-facing organisations.
In our recent research (Buzard et al. 2025), we investigate a simple but consequential dynamic: when an external institution needs to contact a parent, does it choose the mother or the father?
Using a large-scale field experiment covering nearly every school in the US, we show that mothers are 1.4 times more likely than fathers to receive the first call from schools. We find that this gender bias is in part driven by entrenched beliefs about parental responsiveness and is reinforced by traditional gender stereotypes. Moreover, this bias from external parties imposes a measurable burden on mothers that results in downstream disparities in labour force participation, earnings, and health.
Testing the default: Who gets the call?
We designed a field experiment targeting over 80,000 US school principals. Each principal received an email from a fictitious two-parent heterosexual household exploring school options. The message asked the school to call one of the parents and provided the names and phone numbers for both of them. Whether the email was from the mother or the father was varied at random. The ‘no signal’ message did not include any information about parental availability. Yet even in this neutral setting, mothers were called first 60% of the time, compared to 40% for fathers. This 1.4x difference is unlikely to arise by chance. Rather, it reflects a strong societal bias in who is expected to be the primary caregiver.
Figure 1 Callback rates by parent and message type
Notes: In this figure, we show the proportion of decision makers choosing to call the female parent (mum) or the male parent (dad) by the message sent to the decision-maker in our baseline variation. Observations are weighted so that 50% of emails come from a female parent and 50% from a male parent (always cc'ing the other parent) within each bar.
To test whether the gender gap could be reduced by specific messaging from the parents, we varied the contents of the email. Some messages included a sentence explicitly stating that the father had a lot of availability to take calls; others said the mother had a lot of availability.
The results were striking. When the email stated that the father had high availability, the mother still received 26% of the callbacks. But when the email stated that the mother had high availability, she received 90% of the calls; only 10% called dad instead. Even informational nudges such as saying the father had a lot of availability and listing his contact information first were not enough to push all the calls to dad. These results suggest that stereotypes are sticky, and informational nudges alone may not be enough to eliminate bias.
Schools are just the start
This institutional bias is not limited to schools. In another survey with parents of school-aged children, we saw decision makers consistently identify mothers as the primary point of contact. This was true across a wide range of domains – doctors, sports coaches, religious leaders, and more.
In schools, these burdens are compounded by systemic design choices. Many school contact systems only allow one ‘primary contact’ per child, reinforcing a winner-takes-all allocation of responsibility. And in practice, that ‘primary’ is usually mum.
External bias, internal impact
While it is difficult to isolate the precise causal link between external demands and labour market outcomes, we find suggestive evidence that gendered interruptions contribute to broader economic inequality.
Surveyed mothers, as shown in Figure 2, were more likely to say they had chosen lower-paying or more flexible jobs because of child-related interruptions. They were also more likely to say that these disruptions had affected their mental/physical health (Adams-Prassl et al. 2021), their likelihood of being promoted, and decisions about becoming a stay-at-home parent.
The findings align with the broader literature on how care responsibilities drive gender gaps in wages and employment (e.g. Kleven et al. 2019, Goldin 2021). They also mirror related research on hidden barriers for women in the workplace, including the problem with ‘greedy jobs’ which reward long, inflexible hours (Bertrand et al. 2010) and the mental load imposed by managing family logistics (Daminger 2019).
Figure 2 Changes to labour market choices associated with child interruptions
Notes: In this figure, we show the results from a survey of 353 persons who identify as either a mother (45%) or father (55%) in two-parent households with children in the United States. Each person was asked to indicate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with each of the statements about whether “child-related interruptions have led me to choose…'' or “have led to…'' Respondents were told to think of non-routine/unexpected child-related interruptions to their job(s) by external organizations when their children were living at home that were initiated by the external organization (for example, a call about a sick child, an email/text to schedule a doctor/dentist appointment, a reminder to register for camp/practice/extracurricular activities). There were five choices: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree. In this figure we show the proportion who stated they either Strongly Agree or Agree by gender. We perform one-way t-tests comparing the mean for mothers versus fathers with + p< 0.10 * p< 0.05 ** p< 0.01 *** p< 0.001.
Policy and design implications
External demands on parental time are shaped not only by family decisions but also by institutional choices. If schools, medical clinics, and extracurricular programmes automatically direct communication to mothers, they place a disproportionate burden on women, effectively imposing an invisible tax on women’s time.
There are several levers for change:
- Better system design: Many administrative systems should allow for truly equal parental contact fields or alternating notifications. One-size-fits-all ‘primary contact’ fields are outdated and reinforce inequality.
- Informational nudges: Encouraging households to explicitly state both parents’ availability can help combat the bias – especially when combined with non-verbal cues like having the father send the message.
- Training for staff: Awareness of institutional bias is the first step. As with hiring discrimination, surfacing these patterns can help shift norms over time.
Toward equality in caregiving and beyond
External demands may seem small, but their cumulative impact is profound. Mothers are more likely to interrupt their workday, more likely to adjust their careers, and more likely to burn out when they have to carry a disproportionate amount of household labour.
Institutions beyond the household play a quiet but powerful role in perpetuating labour-related gender gaps. To achieve true equality in caregiving and the labour market, we must not only ask how parents divide child-care tasks, but also to whom schools and organisations assign them.
References
Adams-Prassl, A, T Boneva, M Golin and C Rauh (2020a), “Lockdowns widen the gender gap in mental health”, VoxEU.org, 27 April.
Bertrand, M, C Goldin, and L F Katz (2010), “Dynamics of the gender gap for young professionals in the financial and corporate sectors”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2(3): 228–255.
Buzard, K, L K Gee, and O B Stoddard (2025), “Who you gonna call? gender inequality in external demands for parental involvement”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
Daminger, A (2019), “The cognitive dimension of household labor”, American Sociological Review 84(4): 609–633.
Goldin, C (2021), Career and family: Women’s century-long journey toward equity, Princeton University Press.
Kleven, H, C Landais, and J E Søgaard (2019), “Children and gender inequality: Evidence from Denmark”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11(4): 181–209 (see also the Vox column here).
