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 U.S. schools to investigate a potential source of inequality: external demands for parental involvement. Schools receive an email from a fictitious two-parent household 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 and demonstrate that the gender gap in external demands is associated with various measures of gender norms. We also show that signaling a 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.

Social networks are important for finding jobs, but which ties are most useful? Granovetter has suggested that “weak ties” are more valuable than “strong ties,” since strong ties have redundant information, while weak ties have new information. Using 6 million Facebook users’ data, we find evidence for the opposite. We proxy for job help by identifying people who eventually work with a pre-existing friend. Using objective tie strength measures and our job help proxy, we find that most people are helped through one of their numerous weak ties but a single stronger tie is significantly more valuable at the margin.