Prior studies find a significant inequality in time spent by men and women in heterosexual households on child-related tasks even when both work full time. This inequality has been linked to gender inequalities in a wide range of labor market outcomes, human capital accumulation, and economic mobility. We investigate an important potential source of this inequality: external demands for parental involvement. We pair a novel theoretical model with a large-scale field experiment and find that mothers are 1.5 times more likely to be contacted than fathers by their child’s school. We decompose this inequality into “statistical” versus “taste-based” discrimination and test whether it varies by signaling a parent’s availability to better inform policies aimed at closing gender gaps. Moreover, variation in demographic characteristics across the universe of schools and principals allows us to study the implications of our findings for different types of principals, schools and households
