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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

And yet! Even in Sweden, when the daycare, healthcare, or some other institution calls the phone number they have registered for the parent, they fully expect to reach the mother. Sometimes when greeted with a male voice claiming to be a parent, they even put up a fight, claiming they must have dialed it wrong and that they definitely have a mother on file.

My wife is a manager and sits in meetings all day long. I'm still half individual contributor and I'm the one who can easily take calls most of the day. I don't have to explain this very often, but it still feels like once too many.

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I haven't had this experience at all. We have my number registered everywhere because my wife works at a lab and often can't pick up. I've never had anyone calling about the kids seem surprised or ask to talk to the mother.

Edit: actually, those places usually ask for a list of name and number of the parents/guardians. Maybe the number you pick up on was registered as being that of the mother?

Here in Finland I've been treated largely well by other people, when taking our son out to play. Though I think the times when things have gone badly I suspect language barrier was to blame as much as gender.

That said I remember when I took the child to an annual health-checkup, and the first question I received from the doctor was "Where's his mother?"

This has never happened to me. My wife hates talking on the phone so we always register my number. Always been treated 100% well. (Also dad from sweden if that isn't clear).

Yeah I really don't like it, but it's not surprising considering (at least here in Czechia) who are the teachers, it's like 90-95% women, I think I've never seen man working in kindergarten, you can found few in primary school and then it improves from high school and higher, but that's way too late for male role models.

We just had recently sleepover in school which was called "We will sleep in school, we will help mommy" which quite enraged me since I'm doing most of the things around house and can't even think about ocassional case of single parent fathers, why they just can't name it "we will help parents". It's same thing with poems/books (mostly momy tells story, mommy this, mommy that, so when you are reading to them you must replace word by yourself to balance this nonsense), same thing now they done for mother's day pictures, gift (painted mirror) and other crap, do you think they will be doing something for my father's day? Good luck with that.

At least when they contact me they have option between me speaking local language or my wife where they have in brackets (English only), which makes everyone think twice whether they will call father or mother. :-)

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