In the fall of 2020, Jessica Calarco encapsulated what so many families were experiencing during the pandemic in a memorable phrase: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
At the time, Calarco, now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (her promotion to full professor takes effect later this summer), was studying how parents were navigating the pandemic, a project that included two national surveys and hundreds of hours of interviews. That research provided the basis for her
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In the fall of 2020, Jessica Calarco encapsulated what so many families were experiencing during the pandemic in a memorable phrase: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
At the time, Calarco, now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (her promotion to full professor takes effect later this summer), was studying how parents were navigating the pandemic, a project that included two national surveys and hundreds of hours of interviews. That research provided the basis for her new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. The book argues that the unpaid or underpaid labor of women serves as a substitute for national investments in child care, health care, and other social supports, and that messages women and families receive about being self-reliant only prop up a status quo that’s serving almost no one well.
Calarco, who also studies education, spoke with The Chronicle about the perceived threat of downward mobility, the myth of meritocracy, and how she hopes men read her book. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)
Your mother had you when she was in college, took a break, and returned much later, eventually becoming a teacher. Many students have family responsibilities during college now. Has this path gotten any smoother for them, and do you think colleges have a responsibility to support students who are parents?
If you ask someone to picture a college student, they most likely would not picture a person with young children, let alone an older parent with older kids. That default assumption about who a college student is hasn’t changed, and without that shift it’s hard to get momentum behind larger-scale changes that would make higher education easier for families, for example if we allowed parents to count college classes for the work requirements for welfare or for food stamps. Instead, we gate those off and we push women, like some of the women I talk about in the book, out of college and into low-wage jobs, because that’s the only way that they can qualify for the support that they need to keep a roof over their kids’ heads and keep food on the table.
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You argue that college won’t save women, connecting it to your broader point that good choices aren’t enough to protect women from bad outcomes, hence the need for a net. But young people grow up hearing that going to college will grant them access to a middle-class life, and women in particular have heeded that call. Where is this call to college coming from, and why do students — and women, especially — believe it?
Certainly when it comes to college there is a payoff for women, in the sense that the kinds of jobs that you can access with a college degree in our society disproportionately pay better than the kinds of jobs that you can access without one. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that college, in and of itself, is the pathway to stability that it’s often promised for young people — and particularly for women. The types of jobs that women can access with a college degree are often still paid far less than the kinds of jobs that men can access with the same levels of education.
We have to be careful about treating college as the solution, because we haven’t fixed the larger, gendered structures of our economy.
As a result of that, we see [that for] many of the couples that my team and I talked to for the book, she’s a social worker and he works in IT, for example. And so she makes $30,000 a year, and he makes $90,000. When it comes time, in the context of Covid, to decide who’s going to stay home with the kids, it just makes sense financially — despite the fact that in that particular couple’s case, she had a master’s degree and he had only a bachelor’s — for her to be the one to stay home.
We have to be careful about treating college, in and of itself, as the solution, because we haven’t fixed the larger, gendered structures of our economy.
Colleges market themselves to students by emphasizing their return on investment, especially since the recession. Do they have some culpability here?
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We have tried to promote college as a private good, as opposed to a public good. This also drives the push that families feel to help their young children compete for spots in elite colleges, because it’s not only “go to college,” but “go to the best college that you possibly can,” because that is the only way that you will guarantee a path to stability.
If we were to treat college, instead, as a public good, as something that we invest in and ensure that everyone has access to that wants it, we would think of it not that you have to go to the best school that you can, but instead how is investing in college education helping to provide for society and for the economy as a whole?
You have an example in the book of a mom doing really intensive parenting to ensure her kid is successful, where success is admission to a super-selective college.
I talk in the book about this idea that children are under threat and that in our society the people who are best positioned to protect children from threats are their mothers. And one of those perceived threats is downward mobility. So for families that are middle or upper-middle class, there is this fear that if they don’t get their kids into those best colleges, that their kids won’t be able to produce the kinds of privilege, the kinds of opportunities, that they have. That drives a lot of intensive parenting — and it can lead women to sacrifice their own careers.
The mom you mentioned, for example, she had a high-powered corporate job. And then she left that job because she wanted to become a teacher so that she could be home with her kids during the summers and after school, and then ultimately didn’t end up even taking that job and stayed out of the work force because she didn’t trust the child-care centers and the nannies she interviewed enough to feel comfortable going back to paid work. She felt like the only way she could make sure her child’s life was on the right path was if she stayed home.
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One thing I took away from the book was that while families with less income are clearly in a more-precarious situation, these gendered expectations women face at home and at work don’t go away even when families, and the women in the families, make more money. Maybe it just hits a little bit later. I wonder if you think that’s the pattern now, especially for women in academe.
Both with the push for higher education, and with the accessibility of reproductive technologies like IVF, women have been able to delay marriage and parenthood to better fit the model that works with our economic structures.
I talked to one mom, who I call Virginia. She’s a tenure-track professor at a research university, and she’s the primary breadwinner in her family. Her husband is a middle-school teacher. She makes about $75,000 a year, and he makes $45,000. But even though she’s the primary breadwinner, she still ends up being the default parent for their two young kids. They perceive her job as the more flexible one.
When I share this story with many men academics, they’re often taken aback by this a little bit because they often have experienced their wives being the one to sacrifice for their careers as opposed to the other way around.
When I wrote about your work before, you told me you didn’t expect men to read this book. Still true?
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I would love for men to read this book. I don’t know how many will. What I try to do with the second half of the book is to identify some of the myths, including the myth of meritocracy, that delude and divide us in a way that makes it seem like our current status quo is okay, that we don’t actually need a social safety net and that it’s just fine if we continue relying on women to fill those in gaps instead.
Some of those myths affect men — gender myths that on the one hand make it easy for them to justify accepting the perks of patriarchy, accepting women doing a disproportionate share of the unpaid care work because men can sort of see it as “Oh, she’s just happier at home,” or “She’s just better at this than I am.”
But there’s a negative flip side to those same gender norms that force men to focus all of their energies on paid work and to be part of this rat race, to achieve higher and higher levels of success even when evidence suggests that they might actually be happier if they spent more time with their kids.
Let’s talk about meritocracy. I can imagine the sociologists nodding along that it’s a myth, but some of our readers might bristle at that characterization. What do you mean by it?
Meritocracy is this idea that success in our society is determined by hard work and that anyone who has the right mindset and works hard enough will be able to succeed, or at least will have a good shot. Oftentimes that gets translated into individualistic pressures to just make the right choices. If you go to college, if you wait to have children, if you get married, this will lead to these good outcomes.
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But we have to be careful about how correlation is not causation. The kinds of choices made by the people who are successful in our society are often facilitated by the privilege that they had to make them in the first place. And so what often looks like meritocracy is actually privilege in disguise. We have to be careful of promoting this idea of good choices or hard work without acknowledging the level of support and the level of resources and privilege that are necessary to be able to work hard, to be able to devote time to schoolwork or to your job without being pulled by other types of demands.
I know they’re not the main audience, but what would you want a college leader to take away from the book?
It’s very easy for individual employers, individual universities, to focus on: What can we do with the resources that we have for our own students, or for our own employees. As opposed to thinking: We represent a large sector in the American economy. We could use our collective power to push back and demand better.
How can we fight together to offload some of this work and mental load to help our employees and our students? To focus more on what we’re really good at doing, which is the education part of the equation.
Beckie Supiano is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she covers teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. She is also a co-author of The Chronicle’s free, weekly Teaching newsletter that focuses on what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.