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VEST Her Podcast
A podcast exploring the invisible barriers holding women back in the workplace and sharing stories of women navigating careers and building power collectively.
VEST Her Podcast
How Women Became America’s Safety Net
Women in the U.S. aren’t just balancing careers and caregiving—they are the invisible backbone of a broken system keeping our economy afloat. In this episode of the VEST Her Podcast, we sat down with Dr. Jessica Calarco, sociologist, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
Moderating this discussion was Monica Barczak, VEST Member and Founder & Principal of Barczak Consulting, where she works with organizations to promote family economic success and well-being.
Together, they unpacked the hidden burdens placed on women, the systemic challenges that force them into unpaid caregiving roles, and the urgent need for policy reform.
Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is brought to you by VEST, a peer network for women professionals and investment fund investing in women led companies.
This conversation was part of a more intimate coaching session with VEST Members and has been repurposed to accommodate this episode. If you'd like to learn more about joining our peer community, go to www.vesther.co to learn more.
Women as the Default Safety Net
Dr. Calarco’s book, Holding It Together, sheds light on a troubling reality: when government and workplace policies fall short, women step in to fill the gaps—often at great personal and financial cost. She explained how this phenomenon is not just a result of individual choices but rather a deeply ingrained expectation in American society.
“In the U.S., when someone loses a job, falls ill, or can’t afford childcare, we don’t have a strong safety net to catch them,” she explained. “Instead, we rely on women—mothers, daughters, sisters, friends—to step in. This isn’t just about personal sacrifice; it’s about systemic failure.”
Compared to other countries with more robust social policies, the U.S. offers little in the way of paid parental leave, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare—leaving women disproportionately responsible for caregiving.
For the full show notes go to www.VESTHer.co/podcast
Guest Bios
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's an award-winning author, and her most recent book is titled Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She writes the Hidden Curriculum newsletter, and she is also a mom of two young kids.
Monica Barczak, is a VEST Member and Founder and Principal, Barczak Consulting, where she works with organizations to promote family economic success and well-being. Prior to establishing her consulting practice, Monica was Director of Community Health Equity at Ascension, where she designed and implemented strategies to reduce health disparities for low-income uninsured adults in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her tenure, Monica grew the impact of this portfolio from $5 million a year to $12 million a year. Before this, Monica held multiple leadership roles in nonprofits and social impact organizations.
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Women in the US aren't just balancing careers and caregiving. They're the invisible backbone of a broken system that's keeping our economy afloat. In this episode of the Vestor podcast, we sat down with Dr Jessica Calarco, sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Holding it Together how Women Became America's Safety Net. Dr Calarco has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and CNN. She also publishes the Hidden Curriculum newsletter, where she shares research-driven insights on gender work and caregiving.
Speaker 1:Moderating this discussion was Monica Barkzak, best member and founding principal of Barkzak Consulting, where she works with organizations to promote family economic success and well-being. For our guest's full bios and show notes, go to wwwvestherco. Forward slash podcast. This episode is brought to you by VEST, a peer network of women professionals and investment fund investing in women-led companies. This conversation was part of a more intimate coaching session with best members and has been repurposed to accommodate this episode. If you'd like to learn more about joining our peer community, go to wwwvestherco to learn more. If you enjoy the episode, share with a friend and don't forget to leave us a review.
Speaker 2:This wasn't the book that I set out to write. I thought I was going to be writing a book on what we might think of as the best laid plans of motherhood, how women navigate parenting related decisions, especially the more fraught ones, and what happens when things go awry, when we're not able to make the decisions that we set out to in our lives. But I ended up having my own sort of best laid plans moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit in the middle of the data collection that I was doing for this project, following these 250 families over the first couple of years of their children's lives, and it forced me to figure out, you know, how to keep the study going, how to keep collecting data, keep collecting interviews and surveys with my own two young kids at home when the pandemic hit not having childcare, not having schools open and that experience, coupled with the conversations that I got to have at the time, is what led me to write the book, because COVID really made clear what I think so many of us have known or felt for a long time, which is this idea that other countries have social safety nets while the US has women instead. And that's really the quote that I said in an interview early on when I was developing this project, and that became sort of the heart and soul of this book. And what I'm getting at when I say that is that essentially, you know, other countries have invested in policies that not only keep people safe in times of crisis but also help take care of them day to day. You know things like health care and college and child care and sick leave and paid family leave and vacation time and retirement pensions and even things like limits on paid work hours so that we have time to take care of our families and ourselves.
Speaker 2:And what I found in my research is that, you know, in the US we have a long history of especially the billionaires and the big corporations, the ultra wealthy people and the mechanisms that serve them, that don't want to pay for that kind of social safety net, and so really in the process, they've forced us to do what I call DIY society instead. They forced us to take care of ourselves and keep ourselves safe without being able to rely on the government for support, and the problem with that is that we can't actually DIY society. Some people, like the children and the sick and the elderly, need help just meeting basic needs and, at the same time, and without a decent social safety net, to be able to make ends meet financially for ourselves. The rest of us have to devote so much of our time to paid work that we very rarely have the energy and the time that we need to take care of ourselves, let alone take care of anyone else who needs that kind of support.
Speaker 2:And so I argue that this pressure is also part of how this DIY model divides us, because if we want to get ahead in our own careers or have a shot at financial stability, we have to figure out ways to push the work of care downstream.
Speaker 2:We have to find someone, often someone more vulnerable than we are, to do that kind of work, oftentimes for very little or no pay, and that's part of how we get gender inequalities, how men end up pushing the bulk of the paid you know, the bulk of the care work onto women, and then for women with relatively larger amounts of privilege, that often means outsourcing childcare, outsourcing home healthcare for elderly relatives or outsourcing housecleaning in ways that let us get ahead in our careers but that often do so at the expense of other women, disproportionately women of color and low-income women in our society, and essentially that's part of how.
Speaker 2:What I argue in the book is that this DIY model. It's particularly damaging for the least privileged among us, those who have nowhere to turn for support in being able to hold it together, and really nowhere to hide either when other people ask them to hold even more. But at the same time, this DIY model really isn't good for anyone. It's left our whole country sicker, sadder and more stressed than we could be with a stronger social safety net, and it's left even relatively privileged women struggling to feel like we can ever get a real chance at getting a break, let alone getting ahead.
Speaker 3:We'll come back to the policy part of it in just a second, but tell us a little bit about some of the biggest myths about women and work that end up holding us back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so part of what I try to do with the book is to lay out not only you know how did we get here, but what are the myths that are keeping us from changing this, what are the kinds of ideas that we hold that prevent us from trying to build the kind of social safety net that we know works better in other contexts? And one of the myths that I talk about is kind of this idea of the superwoman. You know the idea that if women just lean in or make the right choices, they should be able to do it all and to have it all without relying on anyone else for support in the process. And I show in the book, you know telling stories of women. You know high power career women who have bought into this idea and then the appeal that this kind of message has for them. You know and it makes sense because women especially are so used to not getting the help that they need that it feels empowering to believe that we can do it alone, that if we just make those right choices, if we just follow that seven step plan, that there is a way for us to be able to do it all and have it all without it feeling like a sacrifice, but at the same time, and what I show is that this idea is also deeply damaging for women, because it discourages us from demanding the help that we desperately need and deserve, and it also gaslights us into blaming ourselves if we're not able to manage without support. If we find ourselves struggling, then if we assume that we're supposed to be this superwoman, we have only ourselves to blame.
Speaker 2:And then there's also this flip side of this, in the sense that this superwoman myth it also encourages a sort of learned helplessness among men.
Speaker 2:Many of the men that I talk to, they would tell me things like this one dad that I talked to he's like I don't know how my wife does it. He's like when she's home with the kids, she still manages to answer all her emails and get the laundry done and make dinner, and when I'm home with the kids, I can just barely keep them alive. You know, let alone get anything else done. And you know that kind of reverence or valorization of women. It seems sweet, kind of, from the outside, but what it does is it allows men to feel justified in pushing all of the unpaid care work onto women around them you know which, ultimately and to do so without feeling as though they should be guilty about it, because, oh, if she's better at it, you know, if she can do all this, then I might as well just leave it to her. And that, ultimately, though, ends up reinforcing gender inequalities and making them seem normal and natural in ways that ultimately operate to leave women with more to do and, ultimately, less support in getting it done.
Speaker 3:It's funny I was thinking about, you know, if women are talking about this the help they get at home, right, it's like, oh, you know, my partner slash husband, whatever, he's really great, he helps with childcare. It's like, what do you mean? He helps with childcare Like he's the dad. It shouldn't be helping. Okay, so I do want to kind of dig in a little bit more to how the US safety net compares to other countries, and especially if you did comparisons more like industrialized countries or what have you. But I'm kind of also wondering, you know, as you were describing this leaning into you know you can have it all. You should do it all If you can do it. If you can't do it, you only have yourself to blame.
Speaker 3:Like, I think about that a lot in terms of anti-poverty work as well. Right, there's this kind of and maybe it's very particular to the US this notion of individualism that gets us off the hook about having good public policies, and so it becomes your responsibility you know that you can't do this, or your responsibility that you don't have enough money, or your responsibility that your health is terrible or whatever. So can you just tell us a little bit about what your research found in terms of comparing the US to other countries and our social safety nets that support or don't support working women.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think that to the point that you're making. I mean, one of the other myths that I talk about in the book is it's sort of you can think about it two ways. You can think about it as the myth of meritocracy, or this idea that good choices will save us. You know this notion that we are all. You know that we live in a society where the people who work the hardest, the people who want it the most, the people who are most motivated, that all you have to do is make those good choices or have that motivation, and that will be enough to get us ahead. And you know, I show in the book how those kinds of ideologies they sound good on the surface but they really have things like racism and sexism and even eugenics at the core, in the sense that they push us to ignore the deep structural inequalities that exist in our society and that operate to not only make those quote unquote good choices easier for some people to make than for others, but that also, you know, even for people who are oftentimes in, you know, systematically marginalized or more difficult positions, that even when they do make those quote unquote good choices, that that doesn't guarantee the same payoff for the choices that they make. And so I think that kind of rhetoric, that kind of choice-based, individualistic rhetoric, is deeply damaging, in part because it discourages us from pursuing the kinds of universal social policies that are necessary for all of us to live with dignity that our social safety net is. We do have one, but it's tiny and meager and means-tested in ways that stigmatize and lead to high levels of surveillance of people who are in highly impoverished situations or struggling to get by.
Speaker 2:And the alternative model, which I'll talk about in a minute, is a model that is built on an understanding that all people are deserving of life with dignity. And that is what the myth of meritocracy chips away at. It treats some people as inherently more deserving than others and in the process it creates this perception that you know it's sort of good things for me but not for thee. You know it's like if I've worked hard, then I maybe deserve this extra level of support, but if you are struggling, then clearly you did something wrong and you don't deserve that support unless maybe you jump through all these hoops to prove it. And that kind of universal dignity model it shows up in policies and there's, you know, lots of ways to cut the specifics, but especially if we're looking at our kind of high income country counterparts.
Speaker 2:Places like Sweden, for example, have invested in policies that allow all people to live with dignity, that allow people to access economic opportunities and that also create the conditions for people to share more equitably and sustainably in a shared project of care, and that looks like things like universal, affordable health care. In Sweden, for example, the maximum out-of-pocket cost that any person pays is about $200 per person per year $200, you know US dollars, the equivalent, you know. Compare that to the levels of medical debt that we have in the US. They also have tuition-free college and graduate degrees, which means no student loan debt. They also have tuition-free college and graduate degrees, which means no student loan debt.
Speaker 2:They also have up to 18 months of paid family leave for each child, with kind of encouragements built in for men to take that leave as much as women. They also have very low-cost child care a maximum of about $135 a month for child care, which is pennies compared to what we're paying here. For all kids ages one to five, they also have guaranteed paid sick leave, including extra leave for parents that they can use when their kids get sick. They have monthly child allowances to help families weather all the costs that come with raising children, and they even have things like a men for gender equality program that aims to encourage men to get more involved in caregiving through school based programs, through social clubs, to get more involved in caregiving through school-based programs, through social clubs. And these are efforts that help to lay the groundwork for all people to have that opportunity to have the time, and there's even things like moves toward four-day work weeks or 35-hour work weeks that can help to free up some time. Those kinds of protections.
Speaker 2:It's one thing to give people the support that they need to engage in the paid workforce, but something that often gets left out of the equation is limits on paid work hours, because if we allow our paid work to take over too much of our lives, then we have no incentive to care for ourselves or care for others and no time to do it, even if we want to.
Speaker 2:And that's a place where thinking about it as a balance not just how do we incentivize people to engage in paid work, but how do we make sure that they're protected from paid work taking over too much of their time and energies and selves is another key part of the equation too, and these kinds of policies they pay off. I mean, compared to the US, for example, sweden has higher rates of maternal employment. They have smaller gender wage gaps and motherhood penalties, even things like lower rates of postpartum depression and maternal mortality, lower rates of maternal and child poverty. I mean this translates into higher levels of stability and security across the board and also reduces gender inequality in ways that allow men and women and people of all genders to be able to participate more equitably and sustainably in this kind of project of care.
Speaker 3:What about the effects of the situation, kind of turning the lens back to here in the United States, or actually, if the research tells you something you know from Sweden, for example, about the effects on the children, like, what do we know about the effects on kids when their caregivers, whether that's the mom or the dad or some other caregiver, when that caregiver is particularly stressed because they lack support, what does that mean for the kids? And then, kind of conversely, what do we know about outcomes when caregivers do have a good source of support, whether that's, at the very least, child care or perhaps child care plus other of those types of policies that you talked about? So what do we know about effects on kids?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So unfortunately, what we know is that our DIY society, you know, isn't just terrible for women. It's really bad for all of us, including for kids, and that's in part because when parents are stressed, kids suffer. Parents' stress increases the risk of physical violence for kids. It also takes a toll on children developmentally and academically and behaviorally, and even in terms of things like their physical health and their mental health, in terms of their ability to weather crises, the sort of lasting traumas that can come out of that and the smaller day-to-day struggles as well. And at the same time, we know that a lack of support, especially with caregiving, is one of the key sources of stress for parents and for families with children. Research shows and kind of ironically on that front, the research actually shows that on average, stay-at-home moms are actually more stressed than employed moms, often because they have even lower levels of support. And this actually has to do with the fact that, despite oftentimes the stereotypes around stay-at-home moms, most of the women who are in that situation have been pushed out of the paid workforce because of the high cost of childcare. Roughly 75% of stay-at-home moms in the US have household incomes of under $50,000 a year, but they typically have partners who make just a little bit too much to qualify for any sort of subsidized childcare, and so this puts them in a situation where oftentimes their only option is to stay home, and so many of the moms that I talked to who were in this situation talked about the wanting to go back to work. You know that the loss of identity, the isolation, and yet feeling like they ran the numbers over and over again and couldn't figure out a way to make it work, and so I think it's you know. It pushes back against some of the stereotypes. But at the same time, it's important to acknowledge too, that even for mothers who are employed full time or part time, that their stress increases substantially when they're not able to access affordable and reliable child care. And that's you know.
Speaker 2:I think certainly some of the most stressed moms I've ever talked to are moms who had to work a split shift with their partners that couldn't afford child care but also needed two incomes just to be able to keep a roof over their heads, and so they would end up doing things like staying home all day with the kids and then working a night shift because they couldn't afford child care. That's actually what my own mom did with me when I was first born. My parents couldn't afford child care and my mom had me when she was in college, and so she dropped out and was working, caring for me full time and then working a night shift job, and once they finally had a little bit of money, she put it into starting her own home child care business, because that was the best way to make ends meet financially and also, you know, be home with my siblings and me, and so I think it's you know the kinds of impossible calculus that so many families have to navigate in the absence of child care, and certainly we saw echoes of that, too in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where families experienced disruptions to child care, disruptions to schooling, and saw a rapid increase in the levels of stress that they were facing and the consequences that we've seen in terms of lasting effects on kids' mental health and kids academically. Back in December of 2020, and at kind of the height of the COVID pandemic, I conducted a survey with more than 2,000 parents from across the US, and what I found was that the majority of parents who were working remotely while also caring for their kids at home they reported that they were yelling at their kids more often than they were before COVID, before schools and childcare centers shut down, and ironically those patterns were actually most pronounced among dads. Of the dads who were doing at least some of their work remotely during that kind of early stage of the pandemic, nearly half said that they were yelling at their kids at least once a day.
Speaker 2:And the interviews that I did at the time were telling a very similar story. And I actually talked to a number of moms who, despite their own paid work obligations and the lack of childcare, actually told their husbands or their partners to go back to the office because having their husbands at home they were so angry all the time that it just wasn't worth having them at home that they were making things kind of more tense and worse. I talked to this one mom I called Janet. She was working full-time as a financial administrator when COVID hit and she was able to transition to working full-time remotely and her husband was able to work from home a couple of days a week and they had three kids, three young kids, at home and you know, at first Janet like wanted her husband to be more involved and to kind of be active with the kids.
Speaker 2:But she talked about the days that he was home as just chaos, that he was just constantly yelling at the kids and frustrated that they weren't just doing their schoolwork or weren't just listening when he asked them to do things and she ultimately told him she's like look, it's just, you know, go back to the office.
Speaker 2:It's not worth having you here, it's not worth you know. And at the same time this took a huge toll on her, in the sense she talked about how she was struggling with deep depression during this time, how she had started drinking more heavily, how she gained 30 pounds or 40 pounds in three months, that this was just a kind of deeply stressful time for her and that she could see the toll that this was taking on her kids in the moment too, which, you know, I think, gets us back to this sort of superwoman or supermom myth that we talked about before and how, you know, it often does fall to women to make these kinds of choices and, to, you know, take on more of that stress for themselves, in some cases even to protect their children from other parents who might not be in a position emotionally to handle that kind of stress in the moment because of the lack of experience that they often have, and juggling both things at the same time.
Speaker 3:You know it's interesting, as you were talking about the pernicious effects of stress on children, I started thinking about the adverse childhood experiences, work, and I was thinking well, you know, not having child care, like that's not really one of the 10 aces. You know those factors that contribute. And for those not familiar with ACEs, work, it's this there are these 10 sort of high risk factors that when children experience multiple ones, it really increases their chances of poor health outcomes as adults. So it's this really long lasting thing. But as you were explaining about this one case and again you know it's one case but I'm sure there's many more cases like it Like what did COVID really do in terms of that type of different stress excuse me, of both parents being at home?
Speaker 3:And again, even if there was a great child care system in the community, right, like different communities made different decisions. But this whole sort of notion of how does our safety net bend and flex, as you know, holy, as it is not H-O-L-Y but full of holes, you know, during something like COVID and is that a natural experiment that you know, someone with your research eye is sort of learning about what those impacts had on families from all different kinds of angles. I mean it's super fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think certainly this is, you know, something we're still trying to unpack is what are the long-term consequences of COVID, and I think it's particularly when it comes to kids.
Speaker 2:It's been talked about a lot in terms of learning loss, but I think what we've seen is that reopening schools didn't solve things the ways that people expected them to, that we're still seeing kids struggling academically and behaviorally and socially and certainly mental health-wise, in ways that suggest that there's something much deeper going on here.
Speaker 2:And I think that points to the idea that these, you know, these disruptions were not just challenging in the sense that kids were getting, you know, the academic support that they needed. It was much more about the kinds of stress, the kinds of trauma, the kinds of loss that kids were suffering in the context of COVID and that their families were suffering around them, and the kinds of ripple effects of those broader traumas. I think it's hard to tease apart the mechanisms, but I think there's certainly good reason to suspect that our sort of especially our lack of our willingness to address this as a crisis moment and to just sort of push everyone back to normal as quickly as possible, but I think that may have, unfortunately, done more harm than good in terms of helping to address some of these deep traumas that we've suffered in the process.
Speaker 3:So, coming back to your sort of concept of our DIY system, assuming that we some kind of we would want to fix that, what is the role of government and private and philanthropic sectors in trying to move us off that path and correct and basically fix this issue?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would argue that government has a particularly important role to play here, and that's in part because I'm happy to get more into the specifics with this, with the Q&A. But it's basically impossible to make care work both profitable and sustainable, and that's a big piece of it and that's a place where government almost has to step in. That's the role that government plays. But there's another piece of this which comes from the fact that our kind of emphasis on private solutions is part of what got us into this sort of DIY mess in the first place. And you know, in the book I traced this back to the 1930s and in the wake of the Great Depression. Essentially at the time there were sort of, you know, big business manufacturers, kind of the wealthiest of the wealthy they weren't really billionaires at the time, but the equivalent of today's billionaires were not particularly happy about having to pay the higher taxes that were needed to fund Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. And so those sort of wealthy elites that the National Association of Manufacturers and folks affiliated with that group set out to find a way to persuade Americans that we didn't really need this kind of social safety net that the New Deal would provide, and what they found in the process was a group of Austrian economists who were developing essentially neoliberal theory, which is the idea that societies are better off without social safety nets because, at least according to the theory, the less protection that people have from risk, the more likely they'll be to make good choices and keep themselves safe instead and in subsequent generations. This idea has been thoroughly debunked with data Like this is not how people respond to risk. More people, more risk does not make people make better choices and, if anything, it can sometimes lead to worse choices. But at the same time, many Americans were persuaded to believe this idea anyway, in part because the engineers and the profiteers of this DIY model funded massive, decades long propaganda campaigns, things like General Electric Theater, which was kind of funded by these same groups and went on to launch Ronald Reagan's career. He was the host of this program. That really became what led to Americans voting him into office, and to that end, I mean. These campaigns were aimed at persuading Americans that we don't need taxes, especially on billionaires and big corporations, because people can take care of themselves and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and in part because the wealth generated by billionaires and big corporations will eventually trickle down and help everyone else, and that trickle down model clearly hasn't paid off and, if anything, that the propaganda campaigns that existed for decades helped to elect politicians like Reagan, whose policies things like propaganda campaigns that existed for decades helped to elect politicians like Reagan.
Speaker 2:You know whose policies things like tax cuts, things like the elimination of restrictions on campaign spending ultimately gave you know these sort of these bigwigs and their cronies. You know even more power. You know power that we see playing out in potentially disastrous ways right now in the context of our government. And you know, even before we got to this moment, this power was being used to slash holes in the social safety net that we did have at the time and really helped to lay the groundwork for the kind of precarity that so many of us are feeling. You know the sense that we're all kind of sicker, sadder and more stressed than we could be, and certainly more so than previous generations. And to that end, I mean I argue in the book that really, if we want to fix this, the best kind of most straightforward solution is to increase taxes on those billionaires and big corporations and use that money to fund a decent social safety net, the kind that we talked about before, that lets people live with dignity and access economic opportunities and contribute equitably and sustainably to this project of care. At the same time, I do still think there's a role for the private and philanthropic sectors to play, particularly in lobbying for these kinds of changes and standing up for this kind of shift in our thinking about where responsibility for risk belongs in our society, and certainly also for standing up against the kinds of tendencies toward autocracy that can come with this sort of extreme concentration of wealth and power.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, I sometimes get pushback like well, you know, won't raising taxes be bad for small businesses?
Speaker 2:But I would argue that it's actually the other way around.
Speaker 2:You know, in the US, 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses, and those businesses, like most of us, are struggling under the pressures of this kind of DIY society, in part because of how they've been forced to figure out things like healthcare and childcare and retirement packages for their employees.
Speaker 2:And many of these small businesses can't afford to make ends meet while also paying decent wages and offering decent benefits to their employees. And many of these small businesses can't afford to make ends meet while also paying decent wages and offering decent benefits to their employees, and this creates challenges in terms of recruiting good talent and getting the work done and making sure that the focus is on what you're supposed to be doing day to day. And I would argue that, if we think about focusing on where do we strategically raise taxes and how do we focus that? On those who are most positioned to do more and who, if anything, have been doing far less than their fair share for far too many generations that we can use that money to fund systems like universal health care and universal child care. That would take the pressure off of small business owners and solve some of their biggest day-to-day challenges and let them focus on the kind of innovation that they do best.
Speaker 3:Yeah, really, really, really important and major thoughts there. I have two more questions, but what I'd like to do is pose the next one and then move to audience questions. So I know Gabby has said in the chat, if you have any questions, to please go ahead, put those in. So, as you shared this research, how have folks been responding? Like do they find comfort in your findings? Are they outraged? Like have you learned if your work has been able to inspire anyone to try to press for change? Like what's the reaction?
Speaker 2:you're kind of seeing. Yeah, I mean certainly. I think one of my favorite things as an author is getting notes from readers who tell me that this book, you know, left them feeling not only seen in the kinds of struggles that they're up against, but also empowered to try to work for change. I talked to one mom, for example. She's a stay at home mom in Virginia. She has four young kids. She used to be a teacher but she dropped out of the workforce when her oldest was born because the only child care options she could find in the DC area cost more than what she was making every month. And she told me she listened to the audio book because that's all she could manage as a mom. She's doing laundry and running errands and doing dishes. And she told me that the book, you know, did leave her angry, but at the same time, she talked about it as not in a self-pity kind of way. Instead, she said it's the kind of anger that makes you want to do something about it.
Speaker 2:And you know and I think that you know, even though she told me that, even though she's someone who struggles with social anxiety that she started calling congressional representatives.
Speaker 2:She started organizing with other local parents, in part around the election this past November, trying to work on get out the vote campaigns and, more recently, working to push local schools and community leaders to take steps to protect kids and families from the kinds of political attacks that have been happening in communities around the US in the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 2:And you know, I talked to her about this and I think I may have even convinced her to run for office herself someday, and so I think that you know she's the kind of person that I think would be, and there's terrific organizations like Vote Mama that I've tried to put her in touch with, either for herself or possibly for some of the other women that she's been working with. And I think these kinds of stories, you know, they give me hope that people who often feel the most kind of checked out of politics or the most checked out of news those who aren't kind of feel like I don't have the time day to day to do this that we can. That is a place where we can think about. You know, what are the small tweaks that I can make to where I'm spending my time and my energy and how can I use it to think about being part of community and think about you know, using the energy and the time that I have as strategically as possible to work collectively to push for this kind of change.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's it's. That'd be so gratifying, you know, to hear that and just collect those different experiences and responses, because I'm sure again, because you're proposing such big policy, you know fixes, for example, that there's so much, probably, skepticism and negativism around that, like we haven't done it in decades. We know what we could do, we just don't do it. And so then to hear you know, on the more grassroots level, when people really hear what you're saying and respond in a way that says, you know, I can take some autonomy to do something about this too, that's got to be so cool. Okay, so I haven't been paying really hardly any attention to the chat. So, gabby or Jay, do we have any questions that have popped up or anyone want to raise their hand and come off mute and ask a question for Jessica?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we did have a couple members and if you feel like if this was your question, feel free to unmute yourself as well. We can spotlight you. They asked about what the current anti-DEI rhetoric, what the current, you know, project 2025 agenda is going to do in order to set up the future of women in the US. So not sure if anyone wants to jump off mute. That was. I asked that correctly, but that was definitely a major question in the chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean certainly, I think this is a really important question to be asking right now, in the sense that I think we have I talk in the book about how we have long been in a situation where trapping women in precarity has been a mechanism to push them into situations where they often have no choice but to settle for less than ideal partners and less than ideal jobs and, you know, to do this work of the social safety net because there are no better options on the table. And that, really, that to the extent that we can dehumanize and desensitize people to violence and hatred and mistreatment of others, that that facilitates that kind of exploitation, you know certainly, certainly of women but of many others who are in precarious positions in this moment as well. And I mean that's a huge worry for me in the sense that this kind of rhetoric, even if it doesn't actually change policy, that it has the potential to erode the empathy that we feel toward others and erode the kind of solidarity that has the potential to help us work for change. I mean, I talk in the book about how these myths that you know, things like the myth of meritocracy, things like the myth of the superwoman and the supermom. These are designed to not only dilute us into thinking that we don't need a social safety net because, you know, everybody should just be able to work hard and get ahead, but also to divide us. To divide us by gender and race and class and religion and politics in ways that keep us from coming together to challenge the power of those who are essentially kleptocrats, you know, who are trying to take as much for themselves as possible and leave the rest of us scrabbling in precarity.
Speaker 2:Instead and I think that's a big place where these anti-DEI efforts can operate both, I think, maybe most dangerously with changes in policy, we're seeing essentially a kind of digital re-envisioning of the McCarthy era, where you can not just rely on reports of who is engaged in behavior, but search through them and use AI to help you search through, you know, reports and data to find those who are subject to attacks. But also the kinds of rhetoric that these policies are wrapped in is incredibly dangerous and has the potential to. You know, there's a lot of debates among academics sometimes around, like has the gender revolution, you know? Has it just stalled? And I would argue that, if anything, what we're seeing right now is a gender counter-revolution, that we're seeing a sort of movement in the opposite direction, where things have the potential to get much, much worse before they get better.
Speaker 3:Um, thank you for that insight. The ground is just continually shifting, sort of day by day, and it's's it does feel hard to think that it's like overall going nowhere, but but in reverse. Any other questions, gabby?
Speaker 5:if you have, if you want to, you know, carry on with this question, but is the answer? Government provided support, slash services or funds that families slash individuals can use. So do they provide any of those?
Speaker 2:things.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's certainly I think, in an ideal, oftentimes government, when it comes to things like care-based services, is in the best position to do that work efficiently and effectively, but only if it's well-funded. And so I think there's some caveats when it comes to things like care-based services, is in the best position to do that work efficiently and effectively, but only if it's well-funded. And so I think there's some caveats in terms of, you know, at the same time thinking about the role. So, essentially, if we're thinking about childcare, for example, we want childcare to be high quality. We don't want to sacrifice the kinds of standards you know many one of the reasons that childcare is so expensive is that, you know, for infant care, for example, most states require a ratio of one adult for every four kids, and so that's an incredibly large amount of labor and that's expensive to provide. But it also means that you have and it's spread over a very small number of families, and so either, you know, if you, if you're trying to make a profit off of childcare, you either have to deeply underpay workers or deeply overcharge families, or both, and that just creates the sort of unsustainable system that we're stuck in now, where we see incredibly high rates of turnover, where we've seen workers kind of leaving childcare employment in droves, where we see childcare centers having to close because they can't find enough staff, and where we see families struggling to be able to afford the basic care that they need to keep their jobs and keep a roof over their heads.
Speaker 2:And so I think you know these are the kinds of places where government provided services. This is typically how they're run in other countries. You know the way that we run public schools. You know in the sense that we have a little bit more local control here than many other places around the world do, and there's debates that we could have about the level of local control that is good and necessary for these kinds of services. But certainly I think government provided systems when it comes to things like healthcare, when it comes to things like childcare, when it comes to things like elder care, that these can be systems that operate best when you can have strong regulations for quality in place, when you can have systematic funding and when you can actually get efficiency and quality by investing in good systems that work well and that can be implemented strategically and systematically across the board.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I think there's still a place for flexibility.
Speaker 2:We are a very large country with lots of different communities and lots of different people with lots of different kinds of needs, and so I think having some built-in flexibility with the system can also be helpful too when it comes to supporting families who may need something slightly different for the kinds of individual needs that their kids have or that their aging parents have, and so having other opportunities maybe it's, you know, family stipends that you can use to.
Speaker 2:If grandma really wants to be your childcare provider, what can we do to make that sustainable and possible in ways that don't affect her ability to have a secure retirement, for example, or that don't rely on her to drive, you know, six hours a week to be able to make it to your house without any sort of compensation for mileage? I think there's ways that we can think about how to make the system kind of have a baseline system that doesn't depend on people being in networks that they can rely on for care or having the availability of local private providers, while also building in some flexibility to meet more individual needs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I could just add sort of one thing to that. I mean, one of the things I think that makes thinking about government programs so challenging is we've just set up so many complex rules for eligibility, and so to just to think about more of that, you know, can be maybe not the best path. So you know if you could do it in ways other countries do it where it's either. Perhaps, you know, I don't know if more universal is the answer. Sometimes people say having a universal benefit can make it simpler, but we've set up so many crazy barriers and bureaucracies and red tape for people to get assistance that sometimes you think we don't really even want to help people.
Speaker 3:And there are plenty of experiments around the country with what's sometimes called direct cash assistance or unconditional cash or something like that, which is, I think, part of maybe what Sue's asking about that families know where they need the support and so giving them the resources to be able to purchase what it is that they need. But again, you still might be going out into a market where there is no second shift child care, and so, whether you have resources or not, the second shift child care isn't there. The Saturday child care isn't there, what have you? So there's definitely, I think, a lot of nuances under that, and you know our country has sort of landed in this spot. That makes it hard to think about how we get out of that thicket A little editorializing there.
Speaker 2:No, that's perfect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's a great addition.
Speaker 2:I think you're absolutely right that both and the lack of universal programs, the barriers that we set up in this country, not only make it costlier and so much more complicated, but it also adds stigma in ways that actually some of the mothers that I talked to were eligible for things like WIC, were eligible for things like food stamps, were eligible for things like Medicaid and didn't want to sign up because they didn't want the stigma that came with it, or because they had heard from friends that these programs make you jump through so many hoops that it's just not worth it.
Speaker 2:And so I mean, I think, thinking about how a move to a more universal kind of a model or potentially a cash-based model, especially for some types of assistance, you know, especially if we can strip away, you know, checks, things like a universal child tax credit, is a great model that can put money into families' hands without the need for a lot of overhead, without the need for any sort of checks and balances or checks in terms of eligibility that can slow things down. So I think there are ways to get creative with this, but certainly the models that we have elsewhere are a good place to start.
Speaker 1:Jessica actually has a whole chapter on this, talking about the stigma that often comes along with government-funded programs and, again, the societal norms and beliefs that we've adapted that have kept so many women and working families from actually accessing the support they need. So I think it's just behavioral change that needs to happen. I think it's as a society we need to rethink and deconstruct a lot of what we've learned, to kind of relearn new things. So I just want to say that there is a very important question that I think deserves time here, and it was Strigita. I don't know if you want to unmute yourself and ask it, but I think it's so important, especially because if we look at what happened last year with the election and what's happening now, I feel like loneliness is striking young men particularly very heavily, and I think it's this couple with social media and maybe toxic masculinity. Bro culture is also influencing a lot of their behavior and voting patterns, et cetera. So she asked how can we better educate and embrace younger men to embrace healthier perceptions around gender roles?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a great question. Actually, some of the interesting new reporting has come out that the gap in loneliness is actually not as big. It's only about a 1% gender gap between men and women. It's been sort of overblown by the media to some extent that there is certainly evidence of a mental health crisis across the board and it is affecting men in some ways differently than women, but the loneliness piece of it, you know, has been sort of overblown in certain ways media-wise.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I do think there is a lot of reason to be worried about what's going on with young men these days. I cite in the book, and certainly things have even actually gotten worse than the statistics that I have in the book. Ipsos runs this International Women's Day poll every year and what they've found in recent years is that growing percentages of men, particularly young men, are saying that we've gone too far toward gender equality, that we're getting to the point where this is hurting men as opposed to empowering women, that we should kind of seeing feminism as a threat instead of as a sort of universal project, blaming women for the kind of the plight of men, and that these numbers are troubling. It's almost half, it's about 47 percent of men in the US buy into some of these ideas, and it's actually disproportionately common among younger men, among sort of 18 to 30 year olds that are in our society today and some of the next generation above them as well, and I think this is a place where both in terms of the sort of mental health crisis among men and some of this sort of kind of anti-feminist backlash, I would argue that a lot of this stems from the fact that we you know, we socialize women for caregiving roles from the time that they're old enough to hold a baby doll.
Speaker 2:You know we socialize women for caregiving roles from the time that they're old enough to hold a baby doll. You know we train young girls. I was just talking to my daughter yesterday. She's in fifth grade and her school they assign kids like helper roles when they're in fifth grade and all of the lunchtime, or all of the lunchtime and recess, kindergarten helpers are girls and they have to. You know, help all the kindergartners get their lunches, get their coats on, get them outside, play with them, help them navigate the lunch. You know the recess fights and she's like kids are quitting because it's so hard and that's more work on those of us who are left and I'm like, yeah, I get it. It's this kind of deeply gendered labor that we start on girls from a very young age but we don't train or socialize boys for those kinds of caregiving obligations.
Speaker 2:And I would argue that that, you know, does a disservice, not only in terms of leaving them, you know, underprepared for when they are in caregiving roles which most of them will be at some point, you know, leaving them in positions where they do get more angry, where they do get more stressed because they don't have the level of preparation, but I would argue that it also contributes to this kind of loneliness and mental health crisis, because what it means is that the only source of identity that men have in our society is their paid work.
Speaker 2:You know they can't find solace and joy and identity and value in their lives through the relationships that they have with others, or at least we don't create. We don't help them lay the groundwork for that in ways that we do for girls. We don't help them see the value in friendship, the value in caring for others, the value in being in community with other people or taking care of your community or taking care of your home. There's joy in that, and I think we deny boys that opportunity to find joy in anything but making money and engaging in paid work and getting ahead status-wise, and I think that's a really dangerous situation to be in, particularly in a moment where opportunities to get ahead economically are becoming more precarious and more complicated and can lead to some of the kinds of sexist backlash and racist backlash that we've seen in our society, in terms of men feeling like they're under threat as opposed to seeing or kind of misplacing where the threat is coming from, as opposed to seeing the larger machinations at play.
Speaker 1:What are some key takeaways that or action items that you would want? Not just the VEST members that are here with us today, but also those women and people who want to support that are listening to our podcast. What are some takeaways and action items you want us to leave listening to our podcast? What are some takeaways and action items you want us to?
Speaker 2:leave with. I mean, I think one of the small things that we all can do day to day is catch ourselves when we follow it, when we find ourselves falling into mythical thinking, when we think of ourselves as those super women that are expected to do everything, or when we catch ourselves engaging in that kind of meritocratic thinking, you know, ignoring the systemic barriers that exist in our society and and feeling like, oh well, why don't they just work harder, you know, why don't they just, you know, make the better choices? And when we find ourselves blaming others for the kinds of choices that they make, instead of seeing those bigger structures. And, you know, the next step is to call that out on others. You know, notice it when the people around you, when your friends, your loved ones, your colleagues, are thinking in those kinds of ways and saying, hey, let's rethink this, let's think about why this might not be, you know, the most productive way of thinking about this situation. Or might there be other things at play here that we can push back against?
Speaker 2:And I think that kind of pushing back against the myths is part of how we lay the groundwork for solidarity, because that's, you know, as we've talked about today, what we really need in this moment is for all of us to come together, across our differences, you know, to reject these kinds of artificial divisions that these you know, the engineers and profiteers of this DIY model have tried to.
Speaker 2:You know these bridges or these walls that they've tried to erect between us around things like care, or around shared identities, or around shared struggles, and say how do we come together, how do we form, for example, mutual aid groups or how do we get involved with existing organizations that are doing this work on the ground and finding ways to be in community with others, to support each other and to have spaces where we can hear each other and be vulnerable with each other and then think about, you know, from that place of trust, how do we work together to push for this larger change. So I mean, I'm hopeful that this moment that we're in, as hard as it is, that I am seeing small bits of change, that I am seeing people who aren't typically engaged politically or who aren't typically engaged with media paying attention and stepping up and making changes in their lives, and so I think this is, you know, both a very hard moment for many people, but also, potentially, one that could lead us to something better long term.
Speaker 1:I 100% agree. I often tell people everything is political, as we're seeing now. Jobs are political, safety nets are political, our ability to provide for our family is political. So the sense that we shouldn't engage in politics or political conversations. I think it's like saying, oh, we don't care about schools or we don't care about, you know, being able to provide for our families. So thank you for that. How can members or those subscribers that are listening to this episode find you and connect with you?
Speaker 2:Sure, so I'm on. My website is JessicaCalarcocom, which has links to all my socials. I'm mostly these days on on blue sky and LinkedIn, less so on some of the other platforms, but I'm there too. It's mostly just at Jessica Calarco is my pretty standard, standard name, but I really appreciate all of you being here and I'll look forward to hopefully being in touch and staying in community.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, share with a friend and don't forget to leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your career to the next level, apply to join our community of professional women all eager to help you get there and stay there. Go to wwwvestherco and apply today.
