Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement

The gender imbalance in time spent on child rearing causes gender inequalities in a wide range of labor market outcomes, human capital accumulation, and economic mobility. We investigate a novel source of this inequality: external demands for parental involvement. We pair a theoretical model with a large-scale field experiment that we conduct with a near-universe of US schools. School principals receive an email from a two-parent household with a general inquiry and are asked to call one of the parents back. Mothers are 1.4 times more likely than fathers to be contacted. We decompose this inequality into discrimination stemming from differential beliefs about parents’ availability versus other factors, including gender norms. Our findings underscore a process through which agents outside the household contribute to within-household gender inequalities