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

Kristy Buzard (), Laura Katherine Gee () and Olga B. Stoddard ()
Additional contact information
Kristy Buzard: Syracuse University
Laura Katherine Gee: Tufts University
Olga B. Stoddard: Brigham Young University

No 17922, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Gender imbalance in time spent on child rearing causes gender inequalities in labor market outcomes, human capital accumulation, and economic mobility. We conduct a large-scale field experiment with a near-universe of US schools to investigate a potential source of this inequality: external demands for parental involvement. Schools receive an email from a fictitious 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’ responsiveness versus other factors and demonstrate that the gender gap in external demands is associated with various measures of gender norms. We also show that signaling father's availability substantially changes the gender pattern of callbacks. Our findings underscore a process through which agents outside the household contribute to within-household gender inequalities.

Keywords: field experiment; gender gap; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J16 J22 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17922.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17922

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().