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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenovik on Bloomberg Radio. Well, last year, women's earnings were eighty three point six percent of men's. This is according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is not going to surprise any of you. It's not news to any of you. We know equal payday. We've been
talking about this forever. It's not getting any better. What is talked about less though, is all of the work that women do that's on paid childcare, taking kids to the doctor, cooking for the family, managing the family budget, taking care of elderly family members, figuring out what the kids are doing for the summer, doing all the work for our show.
Here, amen, Tim Stenovic, please go ahead. Tim is actually a really good partner and we share. But in a lot of way, women are the family safety net. They are holding it together. I have to say there's a story my sister loves to say when she was at home with three kids and she and her my brother in law, she and her husband, We're talking about like insurance and she's like, no, you need more insurance for me because I am the limo driver, I'm the cook,
I'm the cleaner, I'm like, you know. She just kind of went through it, and it was a really funny, funny conversation, but she was kind of laying out all the jobs she does, and she says, Yeah, the insurance you need on me is a lot more than you need on you, honey.
I can see Jessica Calarko just nodding right now. She's a sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her new book is called Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. She joins us from Madison at Wisconsin. I got to tell you, we've been talking about this book for a while and it's great
to get to talk to you about it. I just want to start with some numbers here, because your book takes us through a lot of anecdotes of women who you spoke to, who you interviewed, and what they're doing. But we're Bloomberg. We love numbers, we love data. What can you tell us about just how much work women are doing for the American economy?
Sure, so, essentially, women are the default caregivers for the children, for the sick, for the elderly, not only for kids, but filling in those kinds of jobs that you mentioned before, and essentially they are doing this work. This is actually related to the numbers that you mentioned before in terms of you know, women's equal pay or the lack of equal pay, in part because the kind of work that women are doing behind the scenes is a big factor
in where that gender gap and pay comes from. That the more labor, the more unpaid labor, we heap onto women, the harder it is for them to advance in their careers, the harder it is for them to compete with men
and in ways that other countries don't. And research shows that one of the strongest predictors of our economic growth in countries is the amount of money that we invest in providing the kinds of supports that help to alleviate some of those gender gaps in both unpaid work and also the kinds of gender gaps that show up and paid work as well.
Jessica, if the pandemic hadn't Hatten happened, would you have written this book?
I think so certainly. This book started as a project.
I was interested in what I thought of at the time as the sort of best laid plans of parenting, how you have ideas about the kind of parent that you want to be, and life intervenes, and life intervened in the sense of a pandemic happened in the middle of my data collection efforts and really pushed me to want to understand that the interviews that we were doing, in the surveys we were doing with families across the US at the time, really showed how much of an
impact the pandemic was having, especially on families with children, and especially on the moms within those families who were really trying to hold it together in the midst of this crisis, which which led me to want to understand, how did we get to this point of relying on women to be the social safety net for us? And then, in the context of the failure of build back better, you know, why didn't we learn from the mistakes of
the pandemic. Why didn't we pursue those kinds of policies that might have helped to put us on better footing, both genderwise and in terms of economic parity with other types of countries that have used those social safety nets for decades.
Okay, so the simple question with not a very simple answer. How did we get here? How did we get to the point where women became America's safety net?
So we can trace this back to Essentially, in the book, I traced this back to the nineteen thirties and to the pushback in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Essentially, at the time, the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying agency, was looking for ways to resist some of the higher corporate taxes and higher taxes on wealthy people that were needed to pay for these kinds of strong
social safety net programs. And what they found at the time I talked about in the book where a group of neoliberal economists out of Austria who were developing this theory that we don't actually need social safety nets as a country because if we don't have protection, people will take steps, make better choices to keep themselves safe from risk. And this theory has been debunked over time in showing
that that's not actually how people respond to risk. But they use this to fuel not only changes in policy in the US, but also massive propaganda campaigns things like General Electric Theater, which helped to create this perception of kind of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, this very American mentality, and also reinforced traditional gender roles, which helped to lay the groundwork for the kinds of policy decisions
that we made after World War Two. For example, of instead of trying to take steps to allow women to stay in the workforce to continue those rosy, the riveter jobs that they'd had, we shuddered the childcare centers that we put in place during the war, and we pushed women back home and really embraced the nineteen fifties culture around gender and that echoes of that still exist today and the way that we treat women. It was a reserve flo I have.
To jump in because here we are seventy years My grandmother was a Rosie the riveter, like here we are, and she was actually a working woman before and after the war. It was just kind of what they had to do. It was also a time when you had multi generations in a household, and you know, older generations to care of the kids, and you know, but that was kind of my grandparents' household. Having said that, here we are, what seventy years later, and we're still talking
about the same old problems. Tim we talk about childcare, the costs, the juggling, like, why haven't right it's.
I mean, I can speak from personal experience. It's just a daily struggle figuring out who's picking up what kid, who's cooking dinner?
And you guys mean and you guys have childcare, we have childcare.
Yeah.
So I just feel like, why are we still having these difficult conversations. Why haven't we figured out a better system? Why isn't it It's not a new thing, is it policymakers at the federal level? Is it state level? Is it just a society so entrenched that we don't value women as much?
What is it? I mean?
Essentially, other countries use social safety nets to help people
manage these challenges and manage these risks. They use taxes and regulations to not only protect people from falling into poverty, but to help people manage the challenges of daily living things like childcare, things like healthcare, and also to ensure with things like limits on paid work hours, to ensure that people have the time and the energy to do this work of taking care of their families, taking care of their communities, taking care of their homes, even and
in the US, we instead try to DIY society. We tell people that they should be able to manage this risk on their own, but the reality is that that's not possible. And that's where women come in, in the sense that they're tasked with holding it together, with doing the unpaid and underpaid labor that makes it seem like this DIY illusion is possible even when it's leaving us on the edge of collapse.
There's a lot we want to get to in the remaining minutes we have with you. I want to start, though, by just understanding data collection and how you report it out this book. Just give us an idea of how you were able to gather these stories from so many women.
Sure, so we started by recruiting two hundred and fifty pregnant women from prenatal clinics in Indiana, and this was in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, and we were following those same women over time with surveys and in depth interviews every six months from the time that they were pregnant through their first two years postpartum. And the pandemic hit in the middle of this, so we did three additional waves of surveys and interviews with the mothers and
their partners and some of their social network contacts. And then, because this was mostly an Indiana based sample, we also did two national surveys each with over two thousand parents from across the US to better understand how to kind of contextualize the findings from our qualitative data. And then I also dug into a lot of the historical research and some media case studies for the book as well to better understand, you know, how do we get here?
And then what are some of the myths that are helping to the cultural myths that are helping to keep us from changing.
Let's go there, because that's where I want to go. Chapter six, the mars Venus myth. I can't tell you how many times we're having conversations and it's like, well, of course, you know, mars Venus, we're different, We're wired differently, so of course women are the caregivers. It's just the way it is. Go there because I love this sure.
So essentially, there's this myth that is perpetuated by many parts of our culture that suggests that men and women are just funded mentally different, but women are the book
two exactly, so I mean it stems in part. I mean, certainly these ideas are much older than that, but it's echoed in this kind of John Gray's kind of classic men are from Mars, women are from Venus, which almost you know, suggests that men and women are from different planets, not only different species even, And it's echoes of this.
You can hear this in you know, recent conversations, things like Harrison Butker's commencement speech around this idea that women are just happier at home, that women are that that's their natural duty or their natural responsibility to be in
the home. And what research shows is that belief in these kinds of mythical ideas and that they are mythical, that that gender is way more complicated than this sort of simple pink blue binary, and that socialization early exposure, that parents and adult caregivers treat children very differently on the basis of perceived gender from from very early on
in their lives, and that this lays the groundwork. You know, we expect girls to be mothers from the time that they're old enough to hold a baby doll in ways that we simply don't expec for boys.
Well, what's interesting is, you know, and I just want to stop for a moment. There was an interview you did and Tim and I both like reading this. You know that Mars and Venus, men and women are just fundamentally different, both psychologically.
Is you know?
It's an explanation, right, It's also very convenient you have said in the past. It means though we don't need big structural solutions. That's kind of the payoff, right, If we believe that we are fundamentally different, it's not that there's something structurally wrong, and that is maybe why we continue to have this conversation decade after decade.
Exactly what I find in the national surveys that I've conducted with parents is that the majority of dads, for example, believe that kids are better off with their mothers at home.
And what I also find is that the dads who believe in that myth, who believe that it's better for kids to have a mother at home than to have a mother who's engaged in paid work, is that those are also disproportionately the dads who reject the need for a stronger social safety net and essentially believing this myth, believing that women are just happier at home, or that
it's better for kids to have mom at home. Allows us to feel like, well, maybe we don't need to invest in that stronger social safety yet, maybe we don't need paid print to leave or universal affordable childcare because it just works better for everyone if mom is at home, as opposed to in the paid work worse.
Where are we right now as we head into the election of twenty twenty four because I was actually talking with I was talking with a guest early on our crypto show, and she's big in the It was a crypto show, so she's big into crypto, and she sent a tweet out earlier this year, Jessica that talked about choosing between on the ballot women's bodies and the right to have autonomy over your body versus your wallet, because she doesn't believe that the Biden administration is pro crypto enough.
And it was interesting to hear that juxtaposition because and I asked her, is it actually that black and that white for you? And she said, there are a lot of people who are single issue voters when it comes to crypto, But here in twenty twenty four, I think we're at a time when a lot of people never thought that Wade would actually be overturned. How does the conversation in your world shift in an election.
Year like this? Yeah, I mean, I think we have to think about the way that denying people bodily autonomy, denying reproductive rights makes it easier to exploit women's labor. It can push them into motherhood in ways that make it difficult for them not only to have choices about things like finishing college or investing in the kinds of careers that they need to take time for, but can also lead them pushed into the kinds of low wage jobs that offer limited options for their families, that make
it harder for them to get ahead. And so I think we have to think about the way that these kinds of attacks on reproductive freedom are attacks also on women's economic opportunities and on their ability to take care of themselves and their families financially as well.
You get into this idea, I don't want to end without thinking about, like, how do we fix this? You talk about a union of care. So we've got about a couple of minutes left. How do we move forward so that in ten years from now you and I aren't having this same conversation?
Absolutely, I think we have to You mentioned before the break the importance of valuing care work in the sense that we know that women do twice as much unpaid care work in the US as women, and estimates suggests that that unpaid care work done by women is valued
at over six hundred billion dollars a year. And so I think we can think about that the value that women are adding to the economy, even if they're not themselves being compensated for it, and also recognize how that kind of care work benefits all of us, and that if we all had the kinds of policy protections in place, that we could share that unpaid care work more equitably and also ensure that we have the time and energy to do it sustainably so that we can you know,
and I'm guilty myself of having a giant pile of clean laundry piled in my bedroom because I just don't have time to put it all away. But with better protections, we might have the time. And that's where a union of care comes in.
I'm waiting for AI, hoping that's to be quite honest with you, Yeah, Tim, and I keep talking. You know, AI is going to be innovative and disruptive when it can do the dishes and do the laundry, that's what we're looking for. Run a vacuum. Oh, I've got one of those.
Around, so then we can actually so then I would love it. So then I could actually spend more time with my kids, exactly.
Know. Are you hopeful? Just got about twenty seconds, twenty five seconds left.
I think I'm hopeful in the sense that if we can come together and reject the kinds of myths that divide us, that we can fight together for the net that we actually need and deserve. Right.
If anything, we've learned, I feel like since the pandemic, since George Floyd, stereotypes myths like these are things that maybe limit us in thinking differently about the policy that's really needed to solve some of the problems that are out there. Jessica really enjoyed it.
Jessica Clarko.
She is a sociologist associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. It is a new book and came.
Out on June fourth, so you can buy it now.
Yeah, really good stuff and really just kind of an important part of the narrative Jessica, thank you again, really appreciate it.