You know the call. Your kid has a fever, someone forgot a lunchbox, there’s a form missing, an early dismissal, a question about an allergy, a problem on the playground…
Somehow, your phone rings—not your partner’s. Maybe that makes perfect sense in your family, you’re the parent who works from home or has the more flexible schedule or actually asked the school to call you first.
But maybe Dad’s number is sitting directly underneath yours on the emergency contact form. Maybe he’s closer to the school, has more flexibility that day and you’ve specifically asked that he be called. Your phone may still ring anyway.
It’s easy to chalk this up to one more annoying relic of traditional parenting roles. But researchers actually tested whether schools default to mothers when given the option of contacting either parent. They did.
Research found that when schools were given contact information for both a mother and father and no indication that either was more available, mothers received 59 percent of callbacks compared with 41 percent for fathers. Even telling schools that both parents worked full-time did little to erase the difference.
And the implications go well beyond who gets the call from the school nurse.
Why Do Schools Call Mom First?
For a large field experiment published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers Kristy Buzard of Syracuse University, Laura K. Gee of Tufts University and Olga Stoddard of Brigham Young University contacted 80,071 school principals across the United States.
The emails came from fictitious two-parent households and included phone numbers for both a mother and father. Principals were asked to call one of the parents about a general school-related inquiry. When researchers gave no information suggesting that one parent was more available than the other, mothers received 59 percent of the calls and fathers received 41 percent. Put another way, moms were about 1.4 times as likely to be called.
“What struck us was both the magnitude and the persistence of the difference,” Stoddard says. “Schools had contact information for both parents and no reason to believe that one was more available, yet mothers were about 1.4 times as likely to receive the call. And this was a nationwide experiment, so it wasn’t driven by a particular school or region.”
What makes the research particularly interesting is that it moves the conversation about unequal parenting labor beyond what couples are doing behind closed doors. We talk constantly about dividing the dishes, bedtime, pediatrician appointments, daycare drop-off and Saturday morning soccer. We ask whether fathers are doing enough and whether mothers are relinquishing enough control.
But a family could theoretically divide every responsibility right down the middle and still live in a world that keeps handing Mom more of them.
“More broadly, it showed us that the ‘default parent’ role isn’t necessarily created entirely within the household,” Stoddard says. “Parents may want to divide caregiving equally, but they don’t make those decisions in a vacuum. When schools and other institutions systematically direct child-related demands toward mothers, they can reinforce mothers’ role as the parent who handles these responsibilities.”
“That was one of the most important insights for us: outside institutions can contribute to gender inequality within families.”
The school calls her, the pediatrician asks her for the medical history, camp emails her, the birthday-party parent texts her, the babysitter asks her what time the kids go to bed.
A division of labor can happen inside a house. Expectations are being placed on parents everywhere else. And those expectations count, too.
Even Two Working Parents Didn’t Erase the Pattern
One obvious explanation would be availability. Maybe schools assume mothers are more likely to be home, work fewer hours or simply be easier to reach.
The researchers tested that possibility, too. In one version of the experiment, the message explicitly stated that both parents worked full-time. The pattern barely changed. Among callbacks in that variation, mothers still received roughly 59 percent of them. That matters because it suggests the assumption isn’t simply: Mom is probably home.
It may be something much more deeply embedded: Mom is probably the person who handles this.
“One possibility is that people hold beliefs about mothers’ and fathers’ responsiveness that go beyond their employment status,” Stoddard says. “Knowing that both parents work full-time does not necessarily eliminate the expectation that Mom will be the one who answers the phone, leaves work when a child is sick, or takes care of a school-related need.”
“Our results suggest that beliefs about which parent is more likely to respond explain an important part of the gender gap, but not all of it. We also find evidence that broader gender norms matter. So simply providing information that both parents work does not necessarily override deeply embedded expectations about caregiving.”
Any single phone call is tiny—5 minutes, maybe 10—but motherhood is filled with things that are tiny when viewed one at a time. The call itself isn’t necessarily the work. It’s what the call activates. You answer, decide whether the fever requires pickup, you text your partner, you rearrange a meeting, you find out who has the car seat, you remember that the pediatrician closes early on Fridays, you message the after-school program, you figure out what you’re going to do with the other kid…
One interruption has tentacles—and when one parent receives more of those interruptions, she also becomes the parent who knows more, which can make it even more logical to call her the next time. That’s how “Mom just handles this stuff” can become both the assumption and, eventually, the reality.
“That is exactly why we think these seemingly small interactions matter,” Stoddard says. “One phone call is unlikely to have a meaningful effect on someone’s career or division of household labor. But parenting involves years of these small demands—calls from school, appointments, forms, sick children, volunteering, scheduling, and countless other interruptions.”
“If those demands are disproportionately directed toward mothers, they can accumulate. They take time and attention, interrupt work, and may also reinforce the expectation within the family that Mom is the person who handles child-related issues. Our study does not directly measure that cumulative effect over time, but it identifies an external force that can contribute to the unequal demands mothers face.”
Even When Dad Was More Available, Schools Still Sometimes Called Mom
There was some encouraging news in the study: telling schools that fathers were more available substantially changed who got called. So families aren’t powerless here, but the bias didn’t disappear entirely.
Even when the father sent the email himself and indicated that he was highly available, 12 percent of the resulting calls still went to the mother. In the reverse situation—when the mother sent the email and signaled that she was available—only 3 percent of calls went to the father. That’s a pretty remarkable difference. It also points to an uncomfortable flaw in some of the advice we give women about the mental load.
Tell people to call your husband, put his number first, stop volunteering, make him schedule the appointment, don’t automatically answer.
All of those things may help, but they still make women partly responsible for correcting a system that assumed they were responsible in the first place.
“I think this is an important implication of the research,” Stoddard says. “We often talk about gender inequality in caregiving as something couples themselves need to solve: fathers should do more, mothers should delegate more, or couples should divide responsibilities differently.”
“Our results suggest that this is only part of the story. Parents make those decisions within an environment in which other people and institutions also have expectations about who should handle caregiving. A family can decide that Dad is responsible for school communication, but if the school continues to call Mom, maintaining that arrangement becomes more difficult.”
There is, however, evidence that explicitly pushing against the assumption can work.
“At the same time, our experiment also gives us reason for optimism: clearly signaling a father’s availability substantially changed schools’ callback behavior. So these patterns are persistent, but they are not necessarily immutable.”
It’s Not Necessarily That Schools Are Consciously Choosing Mom
None of this means a principal looks at two names on a form and thinks, Childcare is women’s work. Bias usually isn’t that tidy.
The researchers looked at different possible explanations, including beliefs about which parent would be more responsive, social norms and other factors that might influence who gets contacted. They also surveyed educators about different school-related scenarios. Respondents showed the strongest preference for contacting mothers when a child was sick, when a volunteer was needed for a book fair and when dealing with allergies. Mothers were still favored in other scenarios, although the gap was smaller for things like discussing school payments or volunteering at career day.
There’s something almost painfully familiar about that list.
Caregiving? Mom.
Health information? Mom.
Volunteering? Mom.
The stuff we culturally associate most strongly with care still seems to pull us toward mothers.
“We can’t tell from our experiment whether an individual educator consciously thinks, ‘Mothers should handle this.’ In fact, I suspect many of these decisions are not conscious at all,” Stoddard says.
“What we can show is that the gender gap is larger for some kinds of parental involvement and that it is related to measures of gender norms. Tasks involving caregiving may activate particularly strong expectations about mothers’ roles. An educator trying to reach someone quickly about a sick child, for example, may simply have an instinct that Mom is more likely to answer. When thousands of people make that seemingly innocuous decision, however, it creates a systematic gender difference in who receives demands on their time.”
The study does have limits. It looked specifically at fictitious two-parent households with one mother and one father, so its findings can’t tell us how schools navigate contact in single-parent households, same-sex-parent families or the many other ways families are structured. It also doesn’t prove that school phone calls are causing women’s career inequality.
What it does show is something smaller, but incredibly important: when an outside institution had a choice between placing a demand on a mother’s time and a father’s time, it placed that demand on the mother more often. And schools are only one institution.
How Can Schools Stop Defaulting to Mom?
There are obvious ways schools could make this better that don’t rely on individual teachers or administrators remembering which parent called last time.
Forms could ask families explicitly who should be contacted first instead of relying on the order names happen to appear. Schools could make it easier to designate different parents for different days. Systems could rotate contact when parents request equal involvement. Staff could be trained not to assume that “mother” and “primary parent” are interchangeable terms.
Those ideas line up closely with what the researchers themselves believe schools could realistically implement.
“A few very simple changes could potentially help,” Stoddard says. “First, schools could ask families to provide multiple contacts or designate a primary contact rather than implicitly treating the mother as the default, and then make that designation prominent in their records. Second, when parents have indicated equal availability, schools could rotate which parent they contact first rather than consistently starting with one parent. Third, schools could periodically remind teachers and administrative staff not to infer availability or caregiving responsibility from a parent’s gender.”
“None of these requires a major new program. The broader point from our research is that small institutional decisions about whom to contact can systematically affect whose time is being demanded. Making those decisions more intentional could be a relatively simple way for schools to avoid inadvertently reinforcing gender inequality at home and at work.”
Parents can make their preferences explicit, too. If Dad is the first call, say so. If the answer varies by day, tell the school. And if you’ve already told them and they keep calling Mom anyway, it’s reasonable to point it out, but the larger takeaway shouldn’t be another job for mothers.
“Our experiment suggests that explicitly communicating availability can help. When we signaled that the father was the more available parent, schools became substantially more likely to contact him,” Stoddard says.
“But there is a limit to what individual families can accomplish. If the broader default remains ‘call Mom,’ every family trying to divide caregiving differently has to actively push against that default. Ideally, institutions would also examine their own practices so that families don’t have to repeatedly correct assumptions about which parent should be contacted.”
The answer to the maternal mental load can’t always be Mom needs to get better at making everyone else stop giving her the mental load. Sometimes the rest of us need to notice that we’re handing it to her. Because maybe the default parent isn’t created only by what happens between two people at home. Maybe she’s also created one school call, camp form, doctor’s question and “Hi Mom!” email at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do schools call mothers first?
Research suggests schools may default to mothers because of longstanding assumptions about caregiving and responsiveness. In a study involving more than 80,000 U.S. school principals, mothers were more likely than fathers to receive the first callback when both parents appeared equally available.
Are mothers more likely to be the default parent?
In many heterosexual two-parent families, mothers carry more of the planning, monitoring and coordination involved in parenting—the work often described as the mental load. Outside institutions such as schools can reinforce that dynamic when they direct more child-related requests toward mothers.
How can parents get schools to contact Dad first?
Parents can explicitly designate a preferred first contact and ask the school to update its records accordingly. Schools can also help by recording families’ contact preferences rather than treating “mother” as synonymous with primary parent.
