There was a meta moment for Kristy Buzard, associate professor of economics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, that exemplifies the discrepancy in the mental and economic burdens that women carry compared to their men counterparts in the workforce as invisible labor and invisible tasks.
Buzard and her longtime research partners—Laura Gee (associate professor of economics at Tufts University) and Olga Stoddard (associate professor of economics at Brigham Young University)—received word this summer that they had been selected by the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute to conduct research as visiting scholars at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
They will spend two weeks furthering their studies on how women carry a disproportionate share of the mental load, but the exact dates for their residency were held up over child care concerns for Gee and Stoddard. The trio expects to convene at the Federal Reserve in the spring or early summer of 2025.
When it comes to these invisible tasks—which can include scheduling medical appointments, arranging child care and carpools and planning for other child-related extracurricular activities—this is par for the course, according to the preliminary findings of their research proposal.
Kristy Buzard
“There have been several times when one of my co-authors has been presenting the paper and they have to pause because their child’s school is calling and they have to stop what they’re doing to take the call,” says Buzard, a Melvin A. Eggers Economics Faculty Scholar and senior research associate for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.
“Our research strives to understand the disproportionate burden of the mental load that it seems women bear, but we’re also planning on going deeper to understand why that happens, and what the impacts are. Hopefully, this may help us better understand the wage gap between men and women.”
To study the inequality in external demands placed on women, Buzard, Gee and Stoddard ran a large, randomized control trial where they sent emails from fictitious parents in heterosexual relationships to school principals asking them to contact one of the parents. Recording which parent the principal contacted and their reaction to different messages parents might send, Buzard says the group set out to quantify why principals would insist on calling the woman even if she says she’s busy, while respecting the man’s stance that he was unavailable.
The research revealed that mothers are 1.4 times more likely to be contacted by their child’s school than fathers and that parents had a relatively difficult time getting schools, doctors’ offices, day care facilities, places of worship and other organizations to respect their wishes when it comes to which parent should be contacted when issues arise.
“These principals responded less strongly to the signals the moms were sending about being unavailable while largely not calling the men who say they’re unavailable,” says Buzard. “This asymmetry in how the principals behaved led us to ask about the mental load and why mothers end up taking on more of the responsibility when there are more external demands being asked of them?”
Buzard sat down with SU News to discuss the goals of this research, how being a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will advance their efforts and why women have a larger parenting burden placed on them than men.
We’re hoping the Federal Reserve has data they can share that will shed light on our research. The Fed is not a monolith; there’s the Federal Reserve Board at the center as well as the twelve Reserve Banks and all their branches. There are research departments and community development departments. There are economists and people who are more policy and outreach focused who are also interested in these same issues. The more that we as academics, specifically economists, can do to be in touch with people on the policy front lines, the better our research is going to be. We need to be in touch with the policy landscape and I’m excited to connect with the Federal Reserve’s network.
One of the early pieces of data we’re working with is taking transcripts from the voicemails that were left for us from principals—about 17,000 voicemails (out of the 80,000 principals we called)—and doing a sentiment analysis to quantify how nice or mean or happy the principals were in the voicemail. That is, we’re studying what sentiment was embodied in the way these people are talking when they leave the message.
We’re in the very early stage, but what we expect is that if the email sends a signal that says the mother’s unavailable—which goes against the social norm—and if there is pressure on women to always be available as parents, we’d see more negative sentiment from principals when the mother said she was unavailable. If that response is going to be judged negatively, we would hope we could pick that up in these voicemails. If the father is not available, our guess is that’s not really an issue for the principal.
There are these subtle and not-so-subtle social cues that tell women that this [always being available for your child] is your job and you’re bad if you don’t do it. Where does this come from? Why do women do more of this work? If the mother lets something fall through the cracks, is she treated differently than if dad lets something fall through the cracks? These are some of the questions we want to explore.
It closed over time and now it’s kind of stubbornly sitting there, but we’re a bit puzzled at this point as a profession in being able to explain exactly why we don’t seem to be able to [fully] close the wage gap. I’m not sure we can say it has stopped closing, but if you look from the 1980s on, there was a big closing of the gap as more women came into the workforce and we shifted to dual-earner families.
It seems like we’ve hit some kind of limit and we’re not seeing the gap close at any appreciable rate and at this point, a big part of the gap can be explained by motherhood. There’s also a path dependency because child care is so expensive that unless you have two people who are both super-high earners, there is an economic incentive for one of them to step out of the labor force to take care of children when they’re young. Because historically women have made less than men, oftentimes the calculus says it’s better for the family if the mother is the one who steps out of the workforce. But none of this is in isolation—these are norms that developed over time and we’re kind of just stuck now.
If we really want to understand the gender wage gap, we need to think about the ways that the anticipation of this gap has people making career decisions from very early on. We conducted a survey asking a range of questions, thinking about the fact that you might have extra demands coming from parenthood and how that might affect your choice of a college major.
We see twice as many women as men saying they thought hard about this when they chose their college major. We see a lot more people saying they chose to stay at home for some portion of the time [since becoming a mother versus becoming a father]. We see people saying they chose more flexible arrangements, or they might take less money in exchange for more flexibility. The reason all of this is important, aside from people’s health and happiness, is that this can place women at a real disadvantage in terms of long-term outcomes in the labor market.
