This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Holding It Together: Women As America's Safety Net with Jessica Calarco | 215

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

A fair warning before we dive into this conversation – once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it. Our guest is Jessica Calarco, a Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s an award winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net. Jessica has written several books, as well as for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN and she’s here today to talk about the downsides of women “holding it together” The time has come for us to value the essential care work that’s being done by women – not just by saying nice things or thanking moms in awards speeches, but in ways that really matter. Let’s be a country that takes care of the people who care for its people. I won’t say that being a caregiver is woman’s work, but I will say that making sure our caregivers are being taken care of absolutely is. Let’s lighten the load for them, for us, for women. Connect with Jessica: Book: Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net Website: https://www.jessicacalarco.com/  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Book your in depth virtual visit with the menopause and perimenopause medical experts at Midi Health by going to joinmidi.com - they accept most major health insurance plans! 

I am Nicole Kalil, and our guest on today's episode of This Is Woman's Work has a few very bold statements in her most recent book, and I am here for it. Statements like, American society is being held together by women. Other countries have safety nets. The U.S. has women. Women's work is what allows the United States to get by without the infrastructure that our peer nations take for granted. Those are some big statements.

And before we move on, I need to make it really clear that being America's safety net is not at all what I mean or what I hope or desire when I say this is woman's work. Holding it all together, doing it all, having it all, being it all is the old definition. And let's face it, friend, it's fucking exhausting. And it's not even working for us, for the people we love, or for this country. Of course, it does work out well for some people. Supporters of the patriarchy, I'm looking at you. But the vast majority of women, mothers, daughters, and wives, it does not and cannot. And as a fair warning before we dive into this conversation, once you see it, you won't

be able to unsee it. So here we go. Our guest is Jessica Calarco, a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Social Safety Net. Jessica has written several other books, as well as for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. And she's here today to talk about the downsides of women holding it all together. Jessica,

thank you for being here. And I need to start by asking you to explain a little bit more about what it means, or if you could give us some context when you say that women have become America's safety net. Sure. Well, first, thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you today. And I'm excited to have this conversation. In terms of this idea that other countries have social safety nets while the US has women, I think the idea here is that other countries have invested in using social policy and often tax-funded social policy as a way to help people manage risk. They lean on tax dollars, especially and disproportionately from wealthy people in corporations to help protect people from falling into poverty, to give people

a leg up in reaching economic opportunity, and also to make sure that all of us or everyone in those societies has the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care, because we can't outsource everything. We need to be able to take care of our own homes and our own families and our own communities, and even ourselves, but we need time and energy to do that. And that's some of what a social safety net can do. In the US, though, we've tried to DIY society. We've kept taxes low. We've slashed huge holes in the meager safety net that we do have. And we've told people that if they just make good choices, they won't actually need government support. And the problem, though, is that you can't actually DIY society. Forcing people to manage all of that risk on their own has left American families and

communities teetering on the edge of collapse. And at the same time, we haven't collapsed because we've relied on women to hold it together instead, filling in the gaps both in our economy and also in the social safety net. And so that means women are disproportionately the ones who are the default caregivers for children, for the elderly, for the sick, for the destitute in our communities. And they're also the ones who hold disproportionately the lowest paid jobs in our economy. Women hold 70% of the lowest wage jobs in the US economy. And they also disproportionately hold jobs that are underpaid relative to the amount of education that they require, for example. And almost always those jobs are jobs that are too labor-intensive

to be profitable in the kind of market economy that we have. And so without high levels of government subsidies, they become jobs that are difficult to make a profit off of. And so we have an interest in forcing someone to do them, but also to make sure that those jobs are underpaid. And that's, unfortunately, where women often come in. I have so many questions. Okay. So I appreciate you said the lowest wage jobs, but then you also mentioned underpaid because I don't know that this necessarily falls in those categories, but I think of jobs like teachers and nurses and like really important, valuable jobs that people should be getting paid very well for and just aren't. Are we talking about things like that? Absolutely. I talk in the book,

for example, about one couple where he works in IT and he makes $90,000 a year and she's a social worker. She has a master's degree. She's gotten multiple degrees, put in lots of time into schooling, but she was making $30,000 a year, even when she was working full time. Because of how we underinvest in public service industries, things like K-12 teaching, things like social work, things like nursing, we often undervalue those kinds of jobs. into those jobs to make it possible for them to be done at lower pay rates. And the problem with that in the context of couples is that it often means not only that women are doing this work that is underpaid, but that shapes the choices that they make. So in that couple, for example, when they had kids, he was able to persuade her that because she made so little money, it made more sense for her to stay home rather than, in his words, spend half of her paycheck finding childcare. And so it's the sort of the way that we push women into these undervalued jobs

then affects the kinds of decisions that families make and can make it easier to exploit them with unpaid labor as well. Okay, I know there are people who are listening who, like, all they heard was increased taxes and, you know, probably went down the rabbit hole of socialism or I don't know where people's brains go. But this is working in other first world countries, yes? Yes. And the sense that, I mean, so look at France, for example, which has things like universal childcare, universal paid family

leave, even limits on paid work hours, legal limits on the number of paid work hours that people can do every week, which means that they have more time for sleep, more time for leisure, more time to spend with their families. And that reduces gender inequalities. It means that men and women alike are more equivalent in both their paid work hours and their unpaid work hours. And actually, they're doing less of both of those compared to their American counterparts. And so it means that they have more time for themselves, their families, their communities. They're happier. They're healthier than we are. And we often think about like, oh, what are the French eating that makes them so

healthy? But really, it's about the kind of social support that they have in their system and the way that they're protected from sacrificing themselves for the kinds of demands that paid work, especially in the US context, often demands from us. Okay. I want to just check in on my understanding. Are you saying basically that the work that women do, the care that women provide are giving us the illusion that we don't actually need a social safety net when in in fact, we obviously do and women are going to break. And honestly, this was the intention all along in the sense that I talk in the book, I kind of trace these ideas back to the 1930s and to efforts by big businesses and wealthy people to try to push back against the kind of New Deal policies

that Franklin Roosevelt was putting in place at the time, which required higher taxes, especially on wealthy people in corporations. And so they wanted to find a way to persuade people that they could get by without a social safety net, without these kinds of large scale government programs. And what they found at the time was this group of Austrian economists who were developing neoliberal theory. And the core of, I mean, this is like, you know, big heady concept, but in practice, it means that we don't need a social safety net and we'll actually be better off without one because, people don't necessarily make better choices. And if anything, it can sometimes lead them to make worse choices. But it's a kind of palatable idea. And so what they did was what these sort of wealthy people and corporations did was hire these economists, bring them to the US, install them in high-powered positions at universities, where they went on to train the next generation of policymakers and

economists, folks like Milton Friedman, who then went on to orchestrate generations of social policy in the U.S. and also helped to promote things like massive propaganda campaigns. The General Electric Theater was a massively popular TV program that was hosted by Ronald Reagan that ran for decades and featured these kinds of, you know, pull them up by their own bootstraps kind of stories that persuaded many Americans that this DIY model is possible. And then women's labor behind the scenes, you know, because it's not, you can't actually DIY society in those ways. Women's labor ends up filling in the gaps in ways that perpetuate that illusion. And certainly I talk in the book about how it's not that women are choosing to do this work. It's often that we're put in positions where we can't say no or where we're guilted into not saying no,

but it helps to make it seem as though it's possible. So can you give us a few examples of ways we are unconsciously, inadvertently, or being forced to fill these gaps? Yeah. I mean, the push that women experience into this kind of exploitation is particularly forceful for women in systematically marginalized groups, low-income women and disproportionately women of color, who often have nowhere to turn in their communities for support and also nowhere to hide when other people come to them looking for support as well. I talk in the book about one mom who's a low-income Black mom that I call Patricia, who she, at the start of the pandemic, had three kids, two in elementary school and one who was a toddler. And even before the pandemic,

she had chosen to work from home as a customer service agent. It was a very low-paying job that she hated and found it demoralizing, but it was the best job she could find that allowed her to work from home. And she felt like she had to do that. Her partner was only, the best job he could find was like as a construction laborer. And so for her, this was a way to kind of be the backstop for her family to fill in the gaps in the childcare system,

to make sure she didn't have to pay for afterschool care for the kids or summer break care and things along those lines. But at the same time, that meant that when the pandemic hit, she had to take on the full responsibility of caring for the kids

while also working from home full time. And this was deeply difficult for her. She talked about how she would kind of exhaust it all the time and she'd get sharp with the kids, but she felt guilty about that. And so she decided partway through the pandemic that she was going to cut back to four days of work of paid work instead of five, because she's like, maybe this will give me a chance to help my kids. One of her kids was struggling in school and she kind of felt guilty about that. And at the same time, you know, once her family found out that she was taking her extended family found out that she was taking this fourth, you know, this extra day off every week, they were like, oh, this is an opportunity.

You know, she was one of the only people in her extended family who had a reliable vehicle and was living in a city with really terrible public transit. And so for her and for her extended family, this was sort of a huge resource to be able to take advantage of. And she felt like she couldn't say no. She felt like she couldn't deny her mom, for example, rides to the doctor or rides to the grocery store when she had no other good way of getting there. And Patricia also worried about if she said no, what would happen down the line when she eventually needed help from someone else. And unfortunately, that's what ended up happening. She and her husband ended up divorcing during the pandemic. And so

she needed, and by that point, she was actually pregnant with twins in addition to the three kids she already had. And so it was a situation where she needed a lot more help. She needed someone to drive her around after the C-section. She needed someone to help with the older kids while she went to doctor's visits. And it became, you know, a situation where she felt grateful that she hadn't turned people away before. And so I think that kind of shows how particularly for low income women, you know, the kind of, we've underinvested in their communities that make it hard for them to turn away, you know, to have support that they can rely on. But we've also made it difficult for them to not feel like they have to do more. And so it's kind of particularly damning for women in those kinds of deeply marginalized

situations. But even for higher income women, we've kind of left them with so much risk and responsibility that it's very hard for them to be able to manage it all without oftentimes either taking on a lot of that themselves or outsourcing it in ways that end up exploiting other women who are in more vulnerable positions than themselves. I talk in the book, for example, about the guilt that many relatively high income women felt around relying on childcare from workers who were deeply underpaid or didn't have access to health benefits and the kinds of, and kind of navigating the guilt around

that and feeling like I have to do this to be able to compete in the workforce. But I know on the same time that it's hurting these other women that I depend on for my own livelihood. So great examples. I also think too, as we talk about the sandwich generation, it's not just going directionally down to our children. It's also, I would imagine, I don't have statistics on this, but disproportionately being called on to care for parents and the older generation as well. Absolutely. So women are doing kind of, they are the ones who are caught most in this sandwich generation kind of a bind in the sense that they are often, and honestly, these two things tend to reinforce each other in that once

women are doing more of the caregiving labor at home with their children, like we saw with Patricia, that being home or that being around makes them visible to others in ways that make it seem like they can be the default caregiver for others who need assistance. It's sort of this idea that like, oh, look, she's holding it together. She can probably hold just a little bit more in ways that if men are sort of, you know, if they've disappeared behind the office doors, it's easier to forget that they're there, not to ask them. They don't seem, you know, it's easier to bother women when they're already doing care work to ask them to do even more. You know what has been the most frustrating part of perimenopause for me? You'd think it was the hot flashes, brain fog, insomnia, and weight gain, or maybe the increased moodiness,

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In your book, I think it's the first chapter, you talk about how we've been made into mothers in waiting. This feels especially relevant after a recent commencement speech that made me want to be able to breathe fire, but we won't get into that. What do you mean by that? We're being made to be mothers in waiting. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the idea that young girls and women are trained to think of themselves as future mothers from the time that they're old enough to hold a baby doll. And I think there's often this kind of assumption in our culture that there's a biological difference between men and women in terms of their natural suitability for caregiving. And to your point, this feeds into this myth that women are just happier at home. This is where they're naturally supposed to be. And I'm happy to talk

about how my own view of that is that perpetuating that myth allows men to feel like the good guys, even if they're exploiting women. But in the short term and for women, I mean, this is a message that gets internalized and leads to differences in the kind of preparation that women and men, young boys and young girls have for the kind of caregiving roles that they might be expected to fill in society. practice and a lot more confidence in those kinds of roles, which can then make those gender differences in caregiving seem natural, even in ways that they are not. And so certainly, I think that, you know, that kind of preparation, that kind of socialization that we give in terms of gender plays a big role in making it seem as though this is okay, making it seem as though this is reasonable, even when it has really deleterious consequences. In the book, you talk about three different myths. With a little bit of time I'd like to spend on that, can you dive into a little

bit of those three and why they matter? Sure. So the idea with these myths is that the engineers and profiteers of our DIY society, that the businesses and big corporations that are profiting from and benefiting from the kind of DIY society that we've tried to perpetuate by virtue of keeping taxes and regulations low, it allows them to maintain their power. But at the same time, there's more of us than there are of them. And so to keep us from kicking them out, to keep us from voting into office politicians who would build a stronger social safety net, one of the things that they do is perpetuate myths that delude us into believing that we don't need a stronger social safety net and that also divide us by gender and race and class and religion and politics in ways that keep us focused on how we can sort of one up each other and kind of get a little higher on the economic ladder as opposed to fighting together for the kind of social safety net that we all need and deserve. And so, I mean, I talk in the book about three of these types of myths. The first one is that the myth of meritocracy, which is basically the idea that or kind of the perception that if people just work hard enough and if they just have the right

mindset, that they'll be able to be successful. And, you know, evidence has kind of suggested that this doesn't really hold true, that people who work harder aren't necessarily rewarded for that hard work and that lots of people who are very successful haven't necessarily worked hard for what they have. But at the same time, it's a sticky idea, especially in a society as unequal as ours is. It's psychologically reassuring to believe that if you just work hard enough, you'll make it to the top. And so, you know, evidence suggests that more than half of Americans believe in this idea. And also that those who believe it tend to reject the need for a stronger social safety net. And that's, I argue in the book, because it gives us a sense of moral superiority. It means that even those of us who, we could imagine a world, for example, where people who fall just outside the cutoff for welfare, for food stamps, for many government safety net programs would say, hey, I want in on that too. I want to expand that program so that

I could have stronger benefits. But instead, what we see is that the people who are often most opposed to expanding the social safety net are those who fall just above the cutoff line. And that's because in the context of this meritocracy myth, it tells them that they are morally superior, that they must have worked harder to not need that social safety net. And that's what I heard echoed from many women who kind of fell into that category. I talked to one mom, for example, who I call April, who's a white evangelical Christian mom, who kind of, her family only makes about $30,000 a year. She's a stay-at-home mom. And actually, most stay-at-home moms in the US kind of fall into that income category of less than $50,000 a year. And she rejected at the same time, she said, no, I don't want higher minimum wages. I don't want universal childcare. I don't want universal

healthcare. And digging into it, she strongly buys into this idea of meritocracy and even kind of talked about herself. She said like, oh, we didn't need those government programs during COVID. We're used to living frugally. Yes, we said like, oh, we didn't need those government programs during COVID. Like we, you know, we're used to living frugally. Yes, we cash the checks, but you know, we didn't need those checks. We didn't need that money. And she even went further

and drawing on sort of racist stereotypes and saying like, oh, if there's other mothers who need this, they must be going out and getting their nails done. They must be going out partying, kind of critiquing other women who needed that money or who needed government support in ways that allowed herself to feel better, even if she'd be able to benefit from that stronger net. And so I

think that's a clear example of what this kind of mythology can do in terms of undermining support. And then a second myth that I talk about in the book is sort of the myth of Mars and Venus, which to your point before is this idea that women and men are just naturally different and that women are happiest when they are at home and caring for others. And I think what this really does, I mean, this gets back to, I mentioned before this idea that many of the women who are stay-at-home moms in our society are in relatively low-income families. Almost 75% have household incomes under $50,000 a year. And I talk in the book about how many of those women are pushed into those roles because of our sort of missing middle with childcare. Their families make too much money to qualify for government subsidies, but not enough to be able to afford

$1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month per kid. What that means though, is that we have a lot of women who are frustrated, who are kind of pushed into that kind of a situation where they might have know, they might have wanted careers, they might have wanted to be working for pay and supporting their families, but they can't find a job that will allow them to do that in ways that makes childcare affordable. And at the same time, you know, their husbands don't want to feel like bad guys for telling the women, you know, we're going to be cash negative if we both work for pay. And so it makes more sense for you to stay home because I make more than you do. And so these kinds of myths, these kinds of gender myths make it seem as though this is an okay situation, you know, and it makes it seem for men that they can actually praise

their wives. I talked to so many men who said, oh, when I'm home with the kids, I can barely keep them alive. But when she's home, she can do all the things. She can keep the kids alive. She can keep them happy. She can do the laundry. She can do the cooking and the cleaning.

I don't know how she does it. And that kind of, you know, it seems like reverence, but what it's really operating to do is to suggest that there's something just magical or special about women that makes them happy doing this work and means that everybody's better off and that nobody has to feel bad about the kind of exploitation that is happening in the process. Can I just say quickly, on a very personal note, how just disgusting and frustrating that is to me. Like when I see mostly men and mostly, you know, high level professional men, almost like a point of pride of like, I don't know where my kids stuff is. I don't know how to feed them. I, you know, can't do their hair or whatever. Like what in like, you're still a parent. You're still,

I don't know. I like, I can't even hear that without wanting to roll my eyes and be like, this is ridiculous. Maybe one of the two of any couple gravitates towards one thing over the other. And maybe there's one person who enjoys that more or knows more about it. But the idea of being a parent in today's day and age and not knowing how to take care of your child for 24, 48, 72 hours. I'm sorry. I'm done with it. It's, it's not cute. And it, and then it ignores the reality of our lives where, you know, things like divorce, things like separation, things like even partner death are not, you know, they aren't off the table. And it's, you know, and it's, it's deeply frustrating when certainly when, you know, hearing some of these, these conversations and, And it's, you know, and it's deeply frustrating when certainly when,

you know, hearing some of these conversations and, you know, having to sort of smile and nod through them when you're talking to people who are, you know, holding these ideas and wanting to see themselves as good partners and good parents. And at the same time, I think that helps to, you know, it sort of puts a gloss on difficult relationships and acknowledges, I think it's important to acknowledge too, like why do women stay in these relationships? And oftentimes it has to do with the fact that because of things like gender pay gaps, you know, it's risky for many women to divorce, even if they could get some money and child support from a partner, you know, supporting

two households on that level of income is often extremely difficult. And especially if women have sacrificed their careers to be the stay-at-home partner or to take a step back to be the default parent, you know, it's risky. And certainly, I mean, and in some communities, I talked to some women, for example, who'd been through very difficult times with their partners, but were afraid to leave because they knew that their communities wouldn't support them in leaving, especially, you know, deeply religious communities where they felt like, look, my community frowns on divorce. If I leave my husband, I have no one. And that, especially for someone who is a stay-at-home mom and doesn't have many income prospects,

is a risky bet in our society, unfortunately, and kind of compounds the problems with not having a decent social safety net. Okay. And the third myth, the super mom myth, which I can't wait to hear you talk about it, but I feel like I know this one really well. And this is the idea that like we tell women that, you know, and this gets at the idea that women also want to feel like superheroes, just like men want to feel like the good guys, women want to feel like superheroes too. They want to feel valued for the work that they're doing. And this is a place where we tell women in our society that you are the kind of, you are the backstop. You are the natural best protectors for your own children and for children more generally, but especially for your own children. And, you know, that sounds good in theory, but what it

means in practice is that women can be easily lured in by potential or perceived threats to children's wellbeing, whether that's the threat of, you know, CRT in by potential or perceived threats to children's well-being, whether that's the threat of CRT in schools or the perceived threat of things like critical race theory in schools, or whether that's the threat of downward mobility, the threat of loss of status that's often wrapped up in messaging around, you have to get your kid into the right preschool, or you have to get your kid into the right college, that that creates fear among women in ways that lead them to respond by, you know, doubling down on their efforts at home and feeling as though they have to commit all of their energies to their children, even when that means sacrificing themselves. And so it's something that, you know,

different types of messaging appeal to different women, depending on the kinds of fears that they have for their children or the kinds of hopes that they have for their kids' futures. But it's a way that we can kind of force women to kind of gaslight women into believing that they're the problem. And then if only they work hard enough, they can make sure that their kids are successful, even in this highly precarious world. And certainly even, you know, believe that they can have it all in the process too, despite some of the hollowness of the myths there when it comes to, you know, this idea that you can just lean in, you know, if you just work hard enough, you can be successful not only at home, but also at work, when that often ignores the reality that these, you know, correlation is not causation, that even

if there are these habits of highly successful women, that doesn't mean that anyone who puts into practice those kinds of habits will ultimately be successful. And oftentimes, the ability to do those things, whether it's work remotely or whether it's set your own schedule or hire a nanny or hire a housekeeper, that those things often depend on extremely high levels of privilege that are not equally or even anywhere near universally accessible to all. Yeah. Okay. So you said this already. I just want to reiterate it. This idea that we think good choices like college degrees or getting great jobs or what have you, if we make all the right best choices, then we won't need the safety nets. And yet, obviously, there are other countries who

have safety nets. So I guess my question is, why isn't the answer good choices? Yeah. I mean, this gets back to the correlation is not causation problem in the sense that like, yes, there are lots of choices that people make. Things like going to college, majoring in STEM fields, getting married, waiting to have children that on paper look like they might lead to better outcomes. But the problem is that that ignores the kinds of resources and privileges and supports that are often necessary to make those choices in the first place. You know, roughly a third of students who start college end up leaving before they finish their degrees, oftentimes because the costs are so high and because we don't make it

particularly easy for people to be in college. And many of the moms that I talked to, for example, ended up getting pregnant for the first time while they were in college and struggled to afford both childcare and college and end up dropping out in the process because we don't make it possible. We don't provide that kind of support for women or for families or certainly for college students. And so I think it's like setting up, just go to college becomes this sort of expectation, but it's not equally accessible for everyone. And similarly, things like, you know, just major in a STEM field, go get a high powered career, ignores a lot of the sexual harassment, the kinds of challenges that women

face when they pursue those careers, the sort of leaky pipeline problems where women are, you know, not only pushed out of those kinds of careers and those kinds of fields, but also discounted when they're in them. That women, even the specter of motherhood, research suggests, can lead to employers kind of underinvesting in women, paying them less than their male counterparts, not promoting them in ways that they might do for their male peers, in ways that are deeply discouraging for women. And actually, we know that the gender gap in wages is highest for women at the top of the ladder, that there's bigger wage gaps there. And so, I mean, it's discouraging in many cases. And it suggests that, you know, investing in those

good choices alone doesn't necessarily guarantee that women will be, you know, successful. And even one of the deep ironies in the research is that, unfortunately, women who make more money than their partners often end up, you know, there's sort of this tipping point where women and men, when they earn roughly the same amount of money in a household, tend to share things pretty equally when it comes to housework and childcare. But either direction on either end, if women are making less than their partners, or if they're making more, they tend to do a disproportionate share of the housework and childcare. And it has to do with the fact that once you tip over that halfway mark, it starts to become threatening to men's egos, given the kinds of gendered expectations that we have. And so women will start to sort of take steps to protect their

husbands from feeling bad about themselves. And men will start to kind of make those expectations, they'll sort of start to complain and be unhappy in ways that lead women to feel like they have to take those steps to protect them in that process. And so I think we have to be careful about just telling women to make these good choices and assuming that that will solve all the problems in the end. Yeah. Well, it puts the burden and the responsibility right back on us, right? Okay. So we talked a lot about the problem. What kinds of safety nets, I'm kind of trying to shift a little more solution oriented for like the last couple minutes we have, but what sort of safety nets would help to take some of this burden off of women and better

protect all of us? Yeah, I think there's kind of two key parts to a solid social safety net. And the first part is about helping people to kind of offload some of the risk and responsibility that they currently face under the current system. And that means things like universal health care, universal child care, universal, you know, the kinds of universal elder care programs where you can take some of that responsibility that currently falls to families and disproportionately to women and create universal government programs that are funded and high quality and that can make sure that people get their needs met and are able to sort of live with dignity throughout their lives, and ideally are funded to the level where they're not only providing high quality care, but also sustainable care, that we're taking care of the caregivers, that we're making sure that the people who do this work,

whether it's childcare, home healthcare, other, you know, social services in our society, that those people who do that work are taken care of as well. So that, you know, social workers aren't paid one third of what an IT worker, you know, on average tends to make. The other part of the equation is oftentimes less about, you know, using tax dollars to create programs, but instead putting in place requirements, you know, things like universal paid family leave, things like limits on paid work hours, or universal paid time off, paid vacation time. And the idea behind this side of the social safety net is that it makes sure that everyone has the time and energy to contribute to a shared project of care. Even if we're outsourcing childcare, even if we're taking use of a government program

for childcare, that doesn't mean we have care for our kids 24 hours a day. And most families wouldn't want someone else to care for their kids 24 hours a day. But what they do want is to have the time and energy and space to enjoy that time with their children and to feel like they're not, you know, and to enjoy that time with their partner or with their, you know, their extended family as well. And so making sure that people have the time to take care of their children, the time to take care of their homes, you know, that we're not leaving laundry piled up. And I'm super guilty of this myself, you know, on my bedroom floor, because I just don't have time to fold it. And so I'm just going to pull stuff out of the pile.

Because work life eats up so much of our paid time and energy, or of our time and energy, that it's hard not to let things slide. But with better protections on that front, we can make sure that we actually have the time and energy to commit on those fronts as well. Jessica, this conversation has been fascinating. I'm so upset that we're at the 30-minute mark. And if you want to learn more about this, obviously, you can probably hear how researched this conversation is and how researched Jessica's book is. But absolutely go get your hands on Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. You can order it on Amazon or go to Jessica's website, jessicaclarco.com. We'll put it in show notes. I am about halfway through and

will continue to mow through this. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here today, for writing this book, and for your incredibly important work. Thank you for your brilliant questions. This has been a joy to chat with you and I'm so excited to have a chance to share this with your listeners. Absolutely, my pleasure. Okay, I always close us out by sharing something that feels like woman's work to me.

So let me say again that being everybody's safety net isn't it because that job frankly sucks and the pay is shit, but also because it isn't working. In 2023, the United States ranked the 43rd best country in the world for women for many reasons I'm sure, but definitely because everywhere we turn, there is more responsibility on our shoulders, a heavier load to carry, and very little support and lots of shame. And the solution is not good choices and self-care.

It's not being stronger or smarter or diving down the rabbit hole of self-help. If these were the solutions, trust me when I say that I'd know a lot more women who holding it all together would be working for. It is time to value the essential care work that's being done, not just by saying nice things

or thanking moms and wives in award speeches, but in ways that really matter. Let's be a country that takes care of the people who care for its people. I won't say that being a caregiver is woman's work, but I am saying that making sure that our caregivers are being taken care of is. Let's lighten the load for them, for us, for women. That is woman's work.