Form over Function: How School Forms Reinforce Gender Roles

As we head back into the school year (or maybe you've already started), it's time to ask schools to re-examine their forms. This form was sent to me by another mom, and I'm sharing it here with permission. It asks if mom works outside the home, but has no corresponding question for fathers.

I say let's go ahead and get those forms updated to 2021, please, and assume that families come in a grand and beautiful variety of make-ups.

Let's operate from the assumption that while many dedicated moms devote full-time to working at home, many dedicated moms also have jobs outside the home. Some dads are also devoted full-time caregivers. And sometimes families have single dads or single moms, or grandparents and grandkids, and so on.

This kind of assumptive language in forms becomes prescriptive - it subtly implies what a family "should" look like and what mothers and fathers "should" do. Rarely do those implications lead towards a more gender equitable outcome.

And yes, this question is "just a little thing." But the "little" things add up. When you ask mothers what causes them to leave an organization or a profession, it is rarely some big incident that occurred. Nearly always, it is the accumulation of many small incidents that conveyed to them, over and again, that they were not viewed as devoted professionals - they were judged for being "not good enough workers" and "not good enough moms" at the same time.

Conversely, small fixes, added together over time, can similarly make a big difference.