Men have taken on more caretaking responsibilities over the past several decades, but women still spend more time caring for children.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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. Our recent research suggests they do.

Who do schools contact first?

Economists and other social scientists have long recognized that mothers spend more time than fathers on child care, even when both parents work full time. And even though men have assumed more caretaking responsibilities........

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