A: Being the default caregivers for kids and for the elderly, online reading programs for struggling readers and for Online Social Emotional Learning 1st Grade Teacher people who are sick, or destitute in our society. And then on the other side of the equation, also filling in gaps in our economy. Women hold 70% of the lowest wage jobs in our economy. And they´re also the ones who disproportionately hold underpaid jobs at every sort of level of education that they might have. Things like child care, things like home health care, things like even K-12 teaching.
We structure our economy and we structure our society in ways that push women into doing that work and then underpay them for that labor in ways that trap them in that system of exploitation, in similar ways to what we do at home. And this is deeply damaging for women and for families in terms of the cost that it has for their well-being, for their stress levels, for their economic parity. And so at the time, Congress actually, with some pushes from a couple of women who had high profile positions in government, set up a universal child care program, set up national child care centers across the U.S., used defense spending through the Lanham Act to do so.
It's a double edged sword in the sense that on the one hand, having access to remote work can be tremendously beneficial for moms in that it allows them to be in the workforce and to have an income in ways that if they´re dealing with a child care crisis and the only option that they have is to work for pay in-person or on site, that could push them out of the workforce very easily. But the challenge is that remote work is not a great substitute for child care.
During the pandemic, I talked to so many moms who described things like hiding in the bathroom, eating sleeves of Oreos to cope with the stress of having to work from home while also caring for their kids full time. And then the other kind of unfortunate piece of the data ... is that women actually face a higher penalty for using things like remote work options than men do, because they´re assumed to be using it for child care or other types of caregiving reasons.
They are discounted by their employers and penalized for taking these kinds of remote work options, passed over for opportunities for promotion, for example, and seen as less committed, even when men are taking the exact same opportunities. CHICAGO (AP) - Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs like sick time, vacation time and health care. For decades, American women have filled the gaps, to the detriment of themselves and their families, according to sociologist Jessica Calarco.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Calarco discusses her book and explains why women in the U.S. bear the brunt of prohibitively expensive high-quality daycare, limited government assistance and inaccessible paid maternal leave in the wake of the pandemic and beyond. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Associated Press´ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures.
We structure our economy and we structure our society in ways that push women into doing that work and then underpay them for that labor in ways that trap them in that system of exploitation, in similar ways to what we do at home. And this is deeply damaging for women and for families in terms of the cost that it has for their well-being, for their stress levels, for their economic parity. And so at the time, Congress actually, with some pushes from a couple of women who had high profile positions in government, set up a universal child care program, set up national child care centers across the U.S., used defense spending through the Lanham Act to do so.
It's a double edged sword in the sense that on the one hand, having access to remote work can be tremendously beneficial for moms in that it allows them to be in the workforce and to have an income in ways that if they´re dealing with a child care crisis and the only option that they have is to work for pay in-person or on site, that could push them out of the workforce very easily. But the challenge is that remote work is not a great substitute for child care.
During the pandemic, I talked to so many moms who described things like hiding in the bathroom, eating sleeves of Oreos to cope with the stress of having to work from home while also caring for their kids full time. And then the other kind of unfortunate piece of the data ... is that women actually face a higher penalty for using things like remote work options than men do, because they´re assumed to be using it for child care or other types of caregiving reasons.
They are discounted by their employers and penalized for taking these kinds of remote work options, passed over for opportunities for promotion, for example, and seen as less committed, even when men are taking the exact same opportunities. CHICAGO (AP) - Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs like sick time, vacation time and health care. For decades, American women have filled the gaps, to the detriment of themselves and their families, according to sociologist Jessica Calarco.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Calarco discusses her book and explains why women in the U.S. bear the brunt of prohibitively expensive high-quality daycare, limited government assistance and inaccessible paid maternal leave in the wake of the pandemic and beyond. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Associated Press´ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures.