Dear Tech-Patriarchy, we need better default modes

Hot take on the patriarchy and technology (more to come on this one):

When I type in “family” to an image search I often get images like the one above - a hetero married couple with two kids, a boy and a girl. This doesn’t surprise anyone reading this I’m sure. But we know that many families don’t look like this, however, and it’s time we update our technology to match it.

Every summer I get the same reminder: most parent/patient communication systems are built for one parent to receive information — not two. Camps are a great example. If my ex-husband registers our kid, he gets the reminder emails. I don't.

I suspect this design choice traces back to an assumption that whoever fills out the form is the one who needs the updates — which quietly reinforces the fact that primary caregivers (disproportionately women) already carry most of the administrative load in families. Single-recipient systems just compound that.

And guess who ends up doing the extra work of closing the gap these fragmented systems create — chasing down the emails, forwarding the forms, tracking the deadlines someone else received? Mostly women.

In co-parenting and divorced households, this isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a real gap in access to information about your own kid. And these family structures aren't a statistical edge case.

It's 2026. Families look different. Not just divorce, but all kinds of configurations. Our systems (school portals, camp registrations, medical records, you name it) need to catch up. There have to be better defaults here, and I'd love to see more products default to multi-guardian communication instead of treating it as an edge case.