Happy Friday Rulers! I’m excited to be back with you this week. I hope the rain clears up here in D.C. before the weekend. After spending a week battling a cold, I’m ready to enjoy the warmer weather this weekend. Let’s get into it… The uncertainty and panic from the early days of the pandemic may be far in the rearview for some, but the effects still linger for many. When Covid-19 hit the U.S., schools and daycare closures upended the lives of millions of families. Even with the short-lived social benefits provided by the U.S. government at the time, women stepped in to fill the gaps, picking up the slack with online schooling, child care and navigating health crises. As a nation, we took it for granted that women would step in, says Jessica Calarco, the author of a new book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, which came out Tuesday. Calarco, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducts research focusing on the intersection of families and socioeconomic and racial inequities. She followed multiple families through the pandemic years. Through surveys and thousands of hours of interviews, it became clear that women were bearing the brunt of dealing with the lasting societal effects Covid-19 had on families and children, from scaling back paid work to cover child care to becoming primary caregivers of elderly family members. Even when policies were proposed to ease that strain in the U.S., such as temporary fixes through the Biden administration’s Build Back Better proposal, Calacro found that it failed to make lasting changes. The result, she says: Women, particularly working moms, became “social safety nets” — to the detriment of everyone. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. NICKEL: You compare the U.S. to other countries in Europe and Asia. Is there a specific country’s policies you found that should be a model example for the U.S.? CALARCO: I don't think there's necessarily one country that does this perfectly that we can look to, but I think there are lessons that we can take from many other countries about what a stronger social safety net would look like. There are some pretty substantial changes that we would need to make. And that means making universal some of the types of care services that are difficult to make work in our profit-driven market economy, things like child care, things like elder care, things like care for the sick through universal health care. NICKEL: How do you think U.S. policy could address the issue of high child care costs with low wages for child care workers? CALARCO: People are often confused by how child care costs so much. If child care workers themselves are paid so little — they are among the lowest wage workers in our economy. They're often paid at minimum wage, and rarely have access to health insurance or other types of employment benefits. [These are jobs] that are too labor-intensive to be highly profitable, especially if they can't be outsourced. Essentially, this is jobs like child care jobs, home health care [jobs]. [It’s] very hands-on labor that can only be done by a person. Other countries have solved the child care problem by making it a government service essentially. It's often still underpaid in part because of how we devalue caregiving, labor and feminized labor, but it’s paid higher than what we see in the U.S. because it's invested in by governments and by communities in ways that make that work more viable as a career path. And it provides access to employment benefits that workers in the U.S. don't get as well. NICKEL: You write that men, non-binary people and women without children are also used as America’s safety nets. Why focus on mothers specifically? CALARCO: One of the ways that they do that is by exploiting people or getting people to take underpaid jobs or to do unpaid labor in our economy. And lots of different people could be slotted into those roles. The way that we treat motherhood in American society makes it particularly easy for people to be forced into filling in the gaps in our social safety net with doing this unpaid labor, and also filling in the gaps in the economy. One of the easiest ways to push people into this kind of exploitative labor conditions is to make them responsible for children, and then leave them with nowhere to turn for support in managing that responsibility, and then nowhere to hide, when others see them doing the work of child care at home. And then ask them to manage even more. Motherhood, in the absence of strong support systems and particularly in the context of attacks on reproductive freedom, can become this tool for exploitation. NICKEL: Was there anything in your line of thinking that changed over the course of your research? CALARCO: I anticipated before going into this project that we were moving in a direction of more egalitarianism around family decision-making around gender equality and parenting. That we've seen men of the current generation of fathers doing more than their dad's generation was what surprised me most in my own data. And then what I've seen in the other national surveys as well is a kind of retrenchment toward more sexist status. Not only among young men but even among many young women and mothers of young children. I think what my research has suggested in the course of this is that our broken system, the way that we rely on women to fill in these gaps, and the way that our underinvestments in the safety net have forced many families to rely on women, is actually fueling those kinds of sexist attitudes. NICKEL: You examined the lives of mothers from different socioeconomic, racial and health backgrounds. Why was it important for you to highlight the different challenges these women are facing in your book? CALARCO: My goal in that sense is to show how this kind of system of exploitation that we have around motherhood, how we push women into doing a disproportionate share of the unpaid and underpaid labor, the challenges associated with that kind of exploitation fall disproportionately on low-income women and women from systematically marginalized racial groups, because of how we have underinvested in their families in their communities. But I also wanted to show how it doesn't stop there. Even women from higher income families are struggling. NICKEL: How should the conversation around social programs change to foster more support? CALARCO: Addressing the idea that you should feel bad about having to rely on welfare or about relying on other types of government programs like Medicaid or subsidized child care. These are programs that are designed to help people who are dealing with precarious situations. Arguably one of the best ways to help people to recognize the value of these programs is to make more programs universal. Things like universal child care [or] universal health care actually helped to lead people to have more egalitarian attitudes, in part because then there's less inequality in society. The less inequality there is in society, the less incentive there is to buy into these myths to believe that you must be better off than the person a little bit below you on the ladder. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on one level, in the sense that one of the best ways to dispel these myths is to build the kind of social safety net that would reduce inequality and allow all of us to benefit more from this kind of support. In the short term, in the absence of those kinds of policies, I think we can remind people how our fates are connected. We can think about how when things break down, … even across racial lines, or across socioeconomic lines, it affects people's lives elsewhere.
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