More than two-thirds of Americans´ unpaid caregiving work — valued at $1 trillion annually — is done by women, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families based on 2023 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 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.
The Associated Press´ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP´s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. A: It became very apparent very quickly how much of an impact Covid was having, particularly on families with young children and especially the moms within those families who were often pushed into these kinds of default caregiver roles.
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 private tudors their kids full time. In the U.S., we´ve instead tried to DIY society. We left it up to individual people to manage risk on their own, as opposed to allowing them to rely on a social safety net. And in practice, that means keeping taxes low, especially on wealthy people and corporations, cutting regulations and really underinvesting in the kinds of time and resources that people would need to be able to participate more actively in care.
But the problem is that we can´t actually DIY society. That´s too much risk for individuals and families to manage on their own. What I show in the book is that families and communities have been able to weather this shift in American policy primarily by relying on women to be the ones to hold it together. Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies inequalities in family life and education.
She is also the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America´s Safety Net,” published last month. A: Being the default caregivers for kids and for the elderly, and for people who are sick, or destitute in our society.
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