Today, Explained - A woman’s work is never done

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Millions of women left the workforce as Covid-19 forced school closures, but that doesn’t mean they have less on their plates. Is government-funded child care the answer? Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramos-Furham. The U.S. has faced tough economic times before COVID-19.

We've had wars, stock market crashes, housing bubbles burst. Usually, when these tough times come, men are the ones who suffer job losses the most. But this time around... Coronavirus caused this recession that has hit women especially hard, and now it even carries its own name. She-cession. Studies show that when 1.1 million people lost their jobs in September, 80% were women. It cannot be understated just how much women have been impacted by COVID-19 and the economic downturn. Bridget Schulte is director of the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. She writes about women and work and told me why 2020 is different. Usually in recessions, typically men tend to be affected because the industries that are most affected in recessions are things like construction, manufacturing, trade and transportation.

Well, that's completely different in this pandemic. Women are affected really largely in two ways. The first way is that they are in, they are overrepresented or disproportionately represented in the industry sectors that are also most impacted by the pandemic. You know, the restaurants that have had to shut down, the schools and the childcare centers that have had to close. They are overrepresented in industries that have just been decimated here. We're thinking hotels and spas and salons,

clothing stores, Shep. It's just a real challenge. The second thing that really has impacted women is that there's a large segment of the workforce that rely on schools and childcare in order to be able to work. When schools shut down and daycares closed, many women felt they had no choice

but return to jobs as homemakers. I think we have to take a step back and recognize that when you look at census data, the majority of children in the United States are being raised in families where all parents work. So that means that they're either in dual income families where both parents are working, or they're in single parent families.

So families have really borne the brunt of trying to figure out how to combine work, try to keep doing their work and take care and educate their children. So even though sort of everybody's doing more, women are disproportionately doing more. They're picking up far more of the homeschooling, far more of the childcare.

And the consequences are huge and potentially long-term and far-reaching. And I assume this isn't impacting all women the same way. If you're wealthier, you'll probably have an easier time weathering this storm. I think that there is no doubt, and we all need to be incredibly aware of this, that the women who are most impacted are not only women of color, but women of lesser means. There are 15 million single mothers in this country who have been most severely affected by the pandemic. Women of color have been far more disproportionately impacted, again, because

they tend to be overrepresented in the retail, hourly, hospitality kinds of fields. The stress of motherhood, the stress of being a working mom, the stress of growing a business, the stress of being a Black woman in America. These are all the things that I've had to strap on my back. It's sort of the perfect storm that can set women back decades. They have to go to work. They have no protections to kind of give them a little bit more cushion. And they also have kids.

And there really has not been an appropriate response that recognizes that and that does anything to really mitigate it. I think the short-term impacts of so many women being forced to leave their jobs might be easy to guess. I mean, the social and emotional challenges of losing your job are really well documented. But what could the long-term impacts of women exiting the workforce be? Well, so many. So think about that. The Century Foundation came out with a report that said that it could cost women $64 billion in earnings. So there have been other studies that show that with every sort of break from the workforce, women's wages drop. You know, that one-year break,

often for child care reasons, you can lose as much as a third of your lifetime earnings. But if you're out for several years, I mean, that more than doubles. You know, so we don't know, will women be hired back? And kind of throughout the socioeconomic spectrum, will women be able to go back in at the same level? But there is no doubt that there are potential long-term earnings losses, potential long-term promotion, advancement, stability losses. What does this mean for the companies or institutions we work at? I mean, more and more women have ascended to leadership positions in the last few decades. Is this mass exodus from the workforce going to disrupt that progress?

If you just look at the statistics and people don't seem to recognize this. Let's hear it for the women. We are now dominating every level of higher education. Women have earned more than 50% of the college degrees for 30 years. So it's actually men who have been an underrepresented minority in higher education now for almost 40 years. And yet you look at every industry, every sector, there's a huge leadership gap that men, typically white men,

still are in pretty much every position of power, everywhere from politics to academics to media to everything. As we know, the Fortune 500 companies have no Black women as CEOs. And one of the things that I've heard over the years is, oh, there isn't a pipeline. I don't understand what that means

because in my community, I see a plethora of highly educated African Americans who are ambitious, who are zealous, who want to make a difference. So, you know, this is another cost. So the fact that we have lost and may lose a lot of that firepower, brainpower, talent, skill on all levels. It will be another delay in trying to really bring equity and kind of a broader perspective to leadership and decision making. I think you cannot underestimate the really devastating and long-term impacts that we'll have. It means continued leadership by one single life experience from one single demographic, a white man. Speaking of the menfolk, how has the pandemic impacted

their lives at home and with their families? Men are doing more than they did before the pandemic. So many more men are actually, you know, at home. They are seeing how much work it takes to run a household. So our data was collected before COVID and they were not. They were not doing an equal amount of work. Research shows there is still inequality at home with women taking on most household responsibilities. One study estimates it will be, listen to this, another 75 years before men do half the unpaid work at home. But what is interesting is what our data showed, that once men have that experience of care, that's what changes them. That's what changes and shapes their attitudes. It transforms them and transforms their lives. You know, the

other thing to think about is 75% of all health workers are women. They are out on the front lines and their husbands and partners have had to pick up at home. So I think that that could be a foundational change for men, that finally having that experience could lead to maybe social changes long and slow.

This might be a long, slow change, but this might be the beginning of a pretty substantial shift, which will be really interesting to watch. So are you feeling optimistic about our post-COVID, post-vaccine future? So the pandemic has completely changed the narrative in a potentially important way because all of a sudden people are seeing that keys to a healthy economy, keys to productive and stable businesses, childcare is central to that. So when you think long-term, once there is a vaccine, once we go back to some kind of new normal, most women who have been forced out of the workplace will have to go back to work. So now I think we understand just how difficult we've made it for families in this country.

And when we look at our, you know, other competitive economies, other advanced economies, we are such outliers. I think that is much clearer now than it ever has been before. . Coming up, it wasn't always this hard for working families. Brigid tells us how we got to where we are today. . today. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Bridget, it seems like so much of this economic crisis is because of a child care crisis. Have we ever seen the U.S. attempt to offer child care to working women? Yes. To fight this war, 10 million more people must go to work by the end of 1943. During the Second World War, when so many men were off fighting in Europe and in the Pacific, there was an enormous war effort here in the United States. You know, we needed to build tanks and ships and ammunition.

With every man utilized, we are still short millions of hands. We must call upon women. Women were working in shipyards. They were welding the airplanes. Rosie the Riveter, right? They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men. Some jobs, better.

Well, there were cries for, well, what about the children? You know, who's going to take care of the children? So there was a story that came out in a newspaper of a child who was left in a car in a parking lot at a shipyard because the mother had to go to work and had no other option. And there was so much outrage. There was a recognition that this was a systemic and structural problem. When married women with small children have to take jobs,

everything possible will be done to provide day care for the children. And so interestingly, there was not a child care act that was passed. There was not anything like that. It came through like a military construction budget. It was an infrastructure expense, and they built a series of what they called Lanham centers, very close to shipyards, to, you know, ammunition factories, to where women were working.

27% of Richmond shipbuilders were women. Feminine workers with small children inspired the founding of 35 nursery school units and 10 extended daycare centers, which mothered over 1,400 youngsters at a time. Okay, so how did these Lanham centers work? On their way to work, parents left their hopefuls at one of the nursery schools, knowing that the daily routine, commencing with a physical checkup and followed by organized play, would

make their children both healthy and happy. You know, when I was reading about them, I actually wanted to cry, because it was high quality, affordable, on a sliding scale depending upon what you could pay, accessible, easy to get into. The 50 cent daily fee included mid-morning and afternoon nourishment, as well as a hot, balanced lunch. They understood the pressures of trying to work and care for your family. And so sometimes you would go pick your child up and they'd send you home with like a roast chicken and a nice warm meal.

That was part of the plan. So there was a real understanding that providing high quality, accessible, affordable child care was key to the economy, was key to the war effort. And so they did make it work. We have learned as industry that it can be done as a part of an employee service. So don't tell me we can't do it because we've done it before. We know how to do it. So why didn't it stick? Why don't we have Lanham Centers anymore? Attention, the peoples of the West.

World War II is about to come to its official closing. So all of a sudden you had all of these GIs coming home and they needed to go back to work. And so what the government decided is to help the GIs go back to work. They needed to get women out of the workforce

to make room for these returning GIs. The family was solidly founded on the father as patriarch and breadwinner, and on the mother as cook, housekeeper, and nurse of the children. And so they played these newsreels. It was called Modern Woman, The Lost Sex. One of the trends of modern life, which has been cited as most disruptive of marriage, is the increasing economic independence of women. There's like this, the voice of, you know, God, man was meant to work

and women were meant to stay home and care for the family. And their family responsibilities. Everywhere, children of working parents are being left without adequate supervision or restraint. And that somehow if women worked, they had pictures of like little kids playing in the street and smoking, you know, that it was just going to be pandemonium, it was going to be terrible, it was going to be the breakdown of society.

Catastrophic social forces have propelled American women away from femininity and into careers at terrific cost to themselves and society. So there was a very orchestrated effort to get women out of the workforce, a huge cultural effort, but also backed by the U.S. government. So once you wanted women out,

you didn't need to keep funding child care, so those centers all closed. However, many women stayed in the workforce after the Second World War. They didn't all go home. The Ozzie and Harriet ideal, quote unquote, it was only for a portion of American families, most of them white, most of them, you know, middle and upper middle class, but women continued to work. I guess I'm not surprised that on the policy level, the U.S. kind of stopped prioritizing this as they chased

this 1950s fantasy. But what about later when there's this very loud sexual revolution and women start asking for equal pay and pushing for paid family leave? Much has been accomplished over the past 10 years. We have led the fight for comparable worth. Kind of, again, late 60s, early 70s, it was a real moment around the world, you know, that there really had been this very powerful women's movement. We have led in the struggle for quality child care in this country. And in the late 60s and early 70s, it's fascinating. There was this sort of moment, and Republicans and Democrats alike were recognizing, yeah,

that's actually a good idea. And there was a bipartisan movement in Congress to pass universal, easily accessible, quality, affordable childcare. So it

passes both houses of Congress. Well, then, so fascinating, Pat Buchanan was working in the Nixon White House at the time, and he was part of this growing kind of far-right movement. And so Pat Buchanan had just come back from a trip to the Soviet Union. And he was totally freaked out by, you know, all the young pioneers, all dressed alike, and, you know, all the young kids kind of marching in lockstep and spouting Leninist doctrine and he equated child care with that system that he saw and he was totally freaked out and he came back and he convinced Richard Nixon to veto the bill. President Nixon has broken

his own promise to support child development and he has greatly damaged the chances for the children of working families as well as poor children. Mr. Nixon says, and I quote from his veto statement, no immediate need has been demonstrated, unquote, for these centers. I went to interview Pat Buchanan for my book, and one of the things that he said that struck me, he just said, we not only wanted to kill the bill, the child care bill, we wanted to kill the very idea of child care in the United States. Because mothers should be home with cake and pie at three when their children come home from school. So what's shocking to me is that Pat Buchanan, he did. He won. Because we didn't talk about child care. We haven't talked

about child care in a substantive way until now, until the pandemic. And what signs do you see that the federal or local government might actually take this on now? So it is a big ask. It's a big investment. It's a big challenge. And nobody was really talking about it seriously until Elizabeth Warren started to talk about it during the Democratic primaries. I have a two-cent wealth tax so that we can cover child care for all of our children and provide universal pre-K for every three-year-old and four-year-old in America. We can also make high-quality child care affordable and accessible. President-elect Joe Biden has a fairly substantial care plan. It's not just child care, but, you know, after-school care, elder care.

Think of expanded vital services like rides to appointments, meals, day programs for seniors. The whole care economy has come into much sharper focus. And so I will say that there are hopeful signs for really supporting families and finally trying to bring the United States more in line with other competitive economies because it's just been cruel and punishing here. And we need to wake up and do something about it. But, you know, it's all about power and what you can get through Congress. And Congress hasn't been able to get another desperately needed bailout package in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. If it's a divided Congress and a Biden administration, I don't know in the short term how successful they'll be in moving forward on the care plan and the care economy.

We'll just have to see. Bridget Schulte is a journalist and author of the book Overwhelmed, Work, Love, and Play When No One Has a Time. She's also director of the Better Life Lab at New America. I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramos-Furham, who will be back with us on Monday. The rest of us who make the show will be here, too. Our producers are Amina Alsadi,

Will Reed, Mooj Zaydi, and Noam Hassenfeld, who also contributes music. Extra production help this week came from Bird Pinkerton. Cecilia Lay helped too, while also keeping us factual. Breakmaster Cylinder makes our music and keeps us sounding fresh. Our engineer, Afim Shapiro, keeps us sounding smooth. And our supervising producer, Golda Arthur, keeps us in line. Liz Kelly-Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts

and Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thanks for listening.