 Good afternoon. I'm Eric Bustos, chair of the Future Forum Board, and on behalf of the Future Forum, thank you all for joining us for a conversation on motherhood work and the pandemic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about three and a half million moms of school-aged children shifted out of active work in April 2020, moving into paid or unpaid leave, losing their jobs, or leaving the labor force completely. Today we'll talk about the struggle of Texas mothers during the pandemic and what might change. The LBJ Future Forum is an organization that brings together individuals of different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, and national topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create a civil-informed and bipartisan discussions. The Future Forum events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors, including the Downtown Austin Alliance, Carbock Brewery, and Joe Cooke's catering. There will be an opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the conversation. You're able to type questions in the Q&A box throughout the conversation, and we'll address as many as we can at the end. And now I'll turn it over to our moderator, Abby Johnston, Deputy Editor of the 19th, to lead our discussion. Thanks so much, Eric, and thank you very, very much for having me. I'm very excited about our conversation today, which is a topic that is really close to my heart at the 19th. We are a news site that launched last August in the middle of the pandemic that is focusing on gender politics and policy. And so the ways that the pandemic has impacted women, impacted mothers, specifically, something that we report on a lot. And I'm very excited to have this group of panelists here to discuss that with us. So I'd like to introduce them. We have Dr. Nazgul Bagri, who is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is author of a recent study on COVID-19's impact on working mothers of color. Dr. Bagri is also a proud recipient of the 2017 President's Distinguished Teaching Excellence Achievement Award at UTSA. So thank you so much for being here with us today, Nazgul. Our next panelist is Catherine Goldstein. She's the creator and host of the critically acclaimed reported podcast, The Double Shift, which is about challenging the status quo of motherhood. She's an award-winning journalist at Harvard, Neiman Bellow. She's extensively quoted as an expert in issues facing working mothers in New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, and on WNYC and NPR. Thank you very much, Catherine, for being here. And then finally, we have Dr. Elizabeth Gregory, who directs the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Houston, which has just published its 2021 annual update on Houston, Harris County, Gender, and Sexuality data, as well as on the ongoing pandemic gender snapshot. So thank you very much. I'm excited to dive in. We have a lot to talk about. I just wanted to kind of set the stage here because I'm sure that not everyone thinks about all of this quite as much as we might. But, you know, the pandemic has hit working women in many ways. This is our first women's recession in recent memory. And internally at the 19th, we sometimes call it the she session. But women felt the brunt of the economic impact when businesses began to close because of the pandemic. And even as things have begun to stabilize, we're not seeing that women have recovered jobs in the same way that men have. And a big part of that is child care. It's availability. It's affordability. And what we still expect from mothers in terms of the equal distribution of labor in the household and unpaid labor. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how we got to this place where child care was such a problem in the United States. And then for Nazgul and Elizabeth in particular, what that is looked like in Texas specifically, because I know that we have a one son, San Antonio and Houston. So Catherine is as the as the North Carolina outsider love to start with you. And then we can kind of zero in on Texas, the, you know, so most of what we are seeing in terms of the fallout from the pandemic are not new problems. They're just existing problems that have been really exacerbated. So basically, childcare in America was a highly privatized, expensive, unstable industry that relied that was largely unsubsidized relied on high cost for families paying low wages for workers and mostly in workers of color, women of color were largely staffed those industries. A huge percentage of childcare workers lit who work full time live in poverty. It was a very, very broken industry. And so a stress like the pandemic with additional cost closures, safety concerns have forced so many childcare centers out of business. So from a national perspective, you know, our childcare, our childcare infrastructure was terrible before the pandemic. And now it has been stress tested, and it has collapsed. So there is really not going to be any kind of economic recovery until our childcare system is really invested in and built back up. And so what's been exciting for me, I mean, it's, it's bittersweet with because part of what, you know, my work is focusing on a lot of these issues over time. And, you know, for the first time, you hear people like the Fed chair talking about, you know, childcare as an important part of the economy, which is like brand new as part of a national discussion, which is, which is it's sad that it's taken taken it to this point to have that conversation. But because these issues are now going to affect men, and they're going to affect the economy, we're starting to people are starting to seriously consider much more comprehensive public policy solutions, including a couple of initiatives from the Biden administration that are now compatible. Nazgul, can you talk a little bit about about that question and also tell us a little bit about, you know, what you were finding in your research and looking at women in Austin and San Antonio area? I want to start my answer with this quote from Helen Petterson. She says other countries have social safety nets. The US has women. So as Catherine was suggesting, our childcare system is was already broken. And in the state of Texas, a majority of those co workers are going to be women. Almost 80% of workers in childcare in the state of Texas are women. And more than half of them are going to be immigrants, women of non white women, perhaps, and either first or second generation of immigrants. So while we were talking with a lot of women's mothers with one of my student who is actually attending here, Joshua, yes, during our online ethnographic, we found out that some of the child care centers actually really put their workers in a really bad situation. They gave them two choices, which were both bad. One, you can go ahead and lose your job and collect unemployment. The other one was basically work for more than 60 hours to meet the needs, the increased needs of childcare. And that happened in the childcare that my own daughter is going and a lot of those teachers had to work 60 hours. So as Catherine said, these problems were existing and the pandemic like any other societal problems have exaggerated them, they brought them to the surface so we can see what's going on. And you're right, they have been telling us if we don't get the kids back to school or the daycare, we are not going to go back to the economy. I have a lot of more stories from these mothers from that online ethnographic, but I'm going to allow Elizabeth to reflect on that and we can come back to women's stories whenever you're ready. Thank you. Yes, thank you. The dynamic that I agree with everyone, it's always been a problem. It's highlighting the problem that was already there. It was already having an economic impact, but we assumed that economic impact. And this is the opportunity now to be transformative or not, right? So that's the challenge that we have. And that a lot of the Biden gestures, the ARP and possibly the American Family Plan, if that is passed, are raising these issues because they do have feminist economists in their offices, right? They're running a lot of this discussion. So it all fits together, right? So you have women making really low wages all along, getting limited childcare. And part of the reason that they're making low wages is because they have limited childcare and employers can anticipate that they will be unreliable workers. So this is true in Texas and it's true around the country. So the term that I like is schoolwork synchrony. That's what we need, right? If we don't have schoolwork synchrony, then women can't be reliable workers and employers will not invest in them, even if they don't actually have children, they might. So why would an employer invest in a female or you know, with the raises or promotions? And because women weren't rising weren't doing, you know, moving up at the same rates was only a trickle up. They never got into a position where they could create policies that would allow them to move up at a greater rate. So it's been this sort of vicious circle or cycle where it's been self defeating for decades. So we finally have a moment like right before the pandemic where we did have high levels of female employment, we did have women getting elected at higher rates were 25% in the Congress or so, and in the Texas legislature. So you're having women move into policy making roles. And people like Heather Boucher and other economists working for the around the American family plan and things like that are saying, we need to make this investment. So this is the opportunity that we as a state and we as a nation have to imagine, well, not just how do we get back to where we were before, but how if we actually did invest in childcare and an infrastructure, would that actually boost the economy and make a kind of transformative situation in which people could participate in very different ways. And that includes both women and their children, because, you know, about a third, a little more than a quarter, I guess, 20, 29% in Houston of moms are single moms. And their median income is 35,000 so they're not necessarily in poverty, but they are not, they are struggling. And so are their children. So, and that's true, you know, among partnered moms as well. So you have an effect that's not just on the female workforce, but also on the impoverished children, who are also workforce of the future. So these are all workforce issues that could be catalyzed in a very positive way, if we take this opportunity. I want to we'll get back to the childcare industry and some of the things that because I think Elizabeth, like you said, we have an opportunity now with a lot of the big investments that that we're starting to see from the Biden administration. But I want to I want to talk a little bit about the individual impacts on moms and the opportunities that that we're going to see taken away because they had to step back in many cases from work. So, you know, like I mentioned before, we're starting to see women re enter the workforce. It's still not a possibility for many and then still others might have chosen not to re enter the workforce for other reasons after the pandemic and a lot of them relating to childcare. And it's it's a little maybe hard to put a number on this. But we basically we've seen decades of progress for equity in the workforce for women erased by all of this. And so I'm curious from y'all's perspectives, like what are some of the long term impacts that we might expect to see from this giant exodus of women and mothers in particular from the workforce. And Catherine, we'll we'll start with you there. I think that, you know, we we we don't have a clear, you know, we've never no one alive basically has lived through an experience like this. So we don't have an exact blueprint for what's going to happen. But what we can learn is from what happens when women take time out of the workforce to care for children in the before times that were not pandemic related. So what that is, I think the best blueprint for us to understand what could happen without sort of significant public policy and sort of concerted effort in the private sector as well. So basically, research has found it is very hard for mothers, even when they take short amounts of time out of the workforce to get back in at the same level that they were. It, you know, a lot of times I hear people talking about these conversations, well, it's like, oh, I only made, you know, a little bit more than the cost of childcare. So it wasn't worth it. But a lot of times those are very sort of, and again, this isn't a judgment on any one's personal individual decision, because these are such difficult decisions. But a lot of times that that making that calculation actually obscures other costs. So for example, if you decide because your salary is not very high, and so you want to leave the workforce because you don't want to devote most of your salary to childcare, that doesn't account for the retirement savings that you might be getting from that job or social security or professional advancement of working in that field for a number of years that allow you to reach new levels and earn more. So so all of that is to say is that it is even, you know, even if the economy recovers, it's also because of systemic bias against mothers, we may it may be very, very hard for people to sort of reclaim like pretend this didn't happen in terms of their career and their earnings. And that, as Elizabeth was mentioning, is also going to affect who runs companies, who runs for office, who has power in this country, because money is also very equivalent to power in this country. So economic power has a huge, you know, it's hugely influential in in, you know, how we shape our society. So that's sort of the kind of the guide is not, you know, the path forward, if we treat mothers like we've, we've have historically treated mothers, it's going to be a long road to getting back without some really significant cultural and public policy investments. Nazgul, some questions. Yeah, I want to focus on a little bit, give attention to education. UN, back few months ago, published their report on the status of women in rural places in developing countries. And it seems that's what they usually focus. Unfortunately, they don't recognize sometimes in their reports that women are coming in all colors and ages and with different choices in their life. As Catherine was saying, we all, we don't all have similar choices to make, right? So many of these girls and young women have to quit their education during the pandemic to take care of their younger siblings, or their even young children. So education being how we get to go to the, get equipped with the skills to get those higher end or higher paid jobs was interrupted, double the rate for men based on the UN report. So that's something to consider. Women are not just losing their job or are being forced to make really difficult choices to leave their job and stay at home with their kids. They're also have to quit educating themselves either at like higher education or even like a high school education, just come back home. And it's really hard as Catherine was saying, we don't get to jump back where we left when you like, Maryam is a computer engineer. We talked in Austin and she and her husband are both engineer, computer engineer. She gave birth to her daughter in last June and she was making similar to her husband, but because they weren't any daycare availability, she sacrificed, she basically was forced to sacrifice to quit her job. And by the time she's ready to go back, Maryam is not going to make the same amount of money that her husband is making. So this instruction is going to, as Catherine was saying, very unexpected result on women power and economic power. I also wanted to mention that 2020 kind of jumping on what Elizabeth was talking about women being empowered before the pandemic. 2020 was the 25th anniversary of the Beijing platform for gender equality. So it was supposed to be a very, very exciting year for us as women to celebrate. And guess what happened? We are pushed back again. And so I'm all ears to hear what Elizabeth think about that. It was also the Suffrage Centennial. So that was a big point of discussion. And one thing we discovered was that in Houston, because of the close proximity of August to November, and registration had already closed for the people who wanted to vote had to pay a poll tax and they had to pay it by January, they waived the poll tax. And 14,000 men voted and 14,000 women voted and 6,000 of them were African American in Houston because of the waiving of the poll tax. So it was just a sort of hugely informational moment. And that did not occur again when the poll tax was reinstated shortly thereafter. I don't know if I'm still being heard because you are all frozen there for a moment. Can you hear me? But the other point that I wanted to note also was the effect which people have hinted at around issues of status. So for instance, in that couple that you mentioned, where you have two people making the same wage because the decision was made. And we can say that couple made a decision, but also that decision was helped by the infrastructure set up that she would stay home. Another alternative would have been for her to stay home for three months or something or some set of some period of time and for him to stay home too. That would have been an option and it is rarely discussed in our in our universe. But that's also part of why women are viewed as unreliable workers is because it's expected that they will do this work. And if you're going to change things, you actually have to not just have women also do paid work, but also have men do homework. So you have to have it. You can't just say, OK, women will do them both. That doesn't happen. It doesn't work. I mean, or you get the burnout that we're currently having. But what you get as a result of that status change, not to speak to this couple at all, but there, you know, there are various effects of status change and one in the wider world is one of dependency. So if you're if you're making enough money to let's just put this in sort of stark terms, if you're making enough money that you could leave, if the situation became violent or unpleasant, then the likelihood that you will, that the situation will become violent goes down. But if you are making less and you are dependent, that creates a kind of vulnerability that may in itself lead to violence that would not otherwise occur. So what we did see arise in pandemic violence, you know, which was variously registered because sometimes you see, oh, there's a rise in calls and that's a sign. But also sometimes the decline in calls will be a sign that people are locked in with their abuser and that kind of thing. So one of the takeaways if you do see women losing status and economic position is you'll see an overall rise in domestic violence just because it's an effect of dependency. And it plays out in very different ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be direct violence, right? It can be other kinds of status issues within relationships. And as women get more power than we see, you know, you know, equal power, that would be the goal, not more power than others, right? But an equitable voice in society, then you'll see things change about the way decisions around all the infrastructure and about who does care work. If I may, Abby, Elizabeth, you're absolutely right about the status. And in this case, in this couple of years, Maryam decided to breastfeed her so that it's the nature that enforced her to be, you know, later on, perhaps you can equally or some sort of I always have problem with the equal. I don't know how equal the partners can be really, really equally. But in this case, she was like not just forced by the economy and just it was also by the nature. She had to stay there and she knew and as you said, the violence is going to be just the impact of that economic and a status imbalance. She also was suffering from mental health, keep questioning herself. I got my master, what's going on? I'm not going up the careers ladder. So it was like a really, really hard, challenging situation with her. And she and I kept going back and forth about women's rights and the equality as a mother, as a new mother. Yeah, so I would say that's again an infrastructure issue, right? There's you don't have to because breastfeeding cannot be done by men. But but there are other ways to divide time, right? So if you had longer leaves, then you could say at a certain point a woman might start pumping. And then that might be balanced out by the dad staying home. And there is a sense that if that is enforced because otherwise they would lose a certain amount of weight of of leave overall. You know, there's a one year leave and they have to be divided six months, six months or something like that. Some countries have tried those. It does introduce the male parent to care work in a more direct way. And it makes it something and I was impressed by story. There were a number of journalistic stories about how well, my husband lost his job in the pandemic and he was going to stay home with the kids. But after three days, he couldn't take it. So I quit my job. And I was like, what? Three days, you know, but this was somehow people are not used to this idea of sharing care. And and we as a society have to figure out ways to and, you know, give people that experience because it's actually quite a pleasant experience in many respects and men would enjoy it if if only they knew if only if were compensated with respect. Elizabeth, I think that is a great point and I've also seen some research that, you know, men who take real paternity leave are more involved in their kids caregiving up to age six. Like they, you know, they check in with them over time. And so it's also about those competencies. So a lot of times it starts the beginning. If men don't have paternity leave, don't take paternity leave, they don't feel comfortable doing this care work and it creates these lifetimes of imbalances that then also have these economic ramifications as well. So yeah, I mean, one thing I always say is the most feminist thing a man can do is take his fully allotted paternity leave. And that is really part of the overall picture of, you know, not only gender equity in the home, but gender equity in the workplace and like for men to understand how that how hard care work can be and how valuable it is, creates all sorts of different dynamics in our society rather than, you know, the idea that any man who you hire is going to be a better worker because they're not going to have care responsibilities, like that's part of, you know, changing those dynamics in the home also changes those dynamics in the workplace. May I? Yeah, before we go, I think it's very important the feminization of the care. It's a systematic societal level change we need, you know, another example of my own life is that my husband did have the leave, but he was saying and he did take the leave for parents to leave. But many of his male colleagues didn't. So as you were saying, Catherine, it's a systematic ideological problem we have in the U.S. And I'm sure many other countries we have that that needs to be changed. We need to be educating about the the ethics of the care and the feminization of the care in this country, like going back to what we have been finding 82 percent of the nurses in the state of Texas are women. So again, you see that feminization of care in a lot of industry is repeating and also care. Studies has shown that care for elderly parents is usually done by the doctors. Even they are outside the home country. There was an excellent studies of Nepalese graduate student who went to Japan and study and the study shows that the female graduate studies were checking on their parents much more than the male graduate students. So it's just a feminization of the care and how we value care. Yes, we call them heroes, but at the end of the day, we don't even pay them as much as the, you know, we call them heroes. But that's exactly what gender is. Gender is a work assignment system and the work that women are assigned is the work of care. And it also has a pay scale, which is zero. So so that's basically what we're fighting as we work to to rethink work assignment and to realize, you know, that the the job of being a human being has been transformed, you know, just in terms of our lifespans. Just we don't have as many children. So you don't really need to spend your whole life working in that. So that kind of specialization of care doesn't make sense in the same way. So as an economy, and we even, you know, without asking big questions about the larger assumptions about our economy, which is essentially exploitative and assumes that somebody will be doing a lot of work for very little, not just women. But even apart from that, we have to rethink it because it doesn't make sense. And we're not really utilizing the perspectives of all of the potential market makers, you know, and the idea that people should be poor and therefore they'll do multiple jobs for very little is a sort of desperation economy is is a very mean way of running your economy. But it also sort of ignores the idea. Well, if people had money in their pockets, they would be spending it. You know, they'd be going to your business. It's not just that you're giving money to them and they're sitting on it. They're taking it. And, you know, what they call consumption multipliers, right? They go out and they spend it in a lot of other places, which takes us back to this. Well, what happens with the three hundred dollars going away over the summer in our economy? How much of that is going to cause people to go back to work and how much of it is just going to impoverish mothers who are stuck without child care access? So, you know, well, the child care tax credit does start this summer. I will be getting a hundred dollars a month for my three children, six and under. So I think that's actually really transformative. We don't really know the effects because it hasn't gone to effect yet, but this is a potentially transformative policy that if people aren't aware for one year, families, most most American families, if you earn under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, will be getting between two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand, sorry, not a thousand, two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a month cash to help you offset child care expenses. And actually people up to four hundred thousand dollars will also be getting a benefit as well. So it's basically it's a hugely interesting new economic experiment in America that I'm personally excited to benefit from. And I think we'll have a huge economic positive economic benefits as well for many, many others. And the big thing with with the child care tax credit, too, is that it's finally reaching the poorest families out there. You know, that's been a loophole for a long time as the people who are not paying taxes or not getting this child care tax credit. And that's going to be a big change, which there's big lofty goals from the administration that say that it's going to lift. I mean, it is some really huge percentage of children out of poverty. We don't really know how that's going to bear out yet. But it is a really this is a it's a big step as a big step. And speaking of big steps by the administration, I'd like to talk about the American Rescue Plan for a little bit. You know, we've seen we've seen a number of economic stimulus packages where money has been earmarked for child, the child care industry in particular. The American Rescue Plan is the biggest one so far. They they've put thirty nine billion dollars toward the child care system that will be distributed to states. The states will turn around and figure out it's a one time investment. They will figure out what they would like to use on. The administration has issued guidance, but it is mostly up to the states to figure out how to distribute those funds. We're seeing some really interesting things across the United States in terms of like how how people have started to use previous stimulus dollars towards child care industries. But I'm curious if if you all can talk about anything interesting that you've seen in terms of how those investments are being used, how people are talking about how the investment should be used either in Texas or in other states that we might look at, too, as a model. And now as well as Elizabeth, I can start with you. Oh, sorry. No, you're fine. I had a conversation with someone who indicated that one option would be a child care voucher that could be taken to any provider that would allow people to make their own choices as opposed to being told to go to one or another. Kind of provider. So that was that was an interesting. Consideration that was being made because I states, counties, cities, ISDs are all school districts are all having to make these decisions really fast and try to be innovative. So they need input from people around those. And making the I think there is discussion around making the child care credit permanent over the long term. We were calculating there about three million poor children in Texas who previously were not eligible for the tax credit because their family didn't didn't file taxes. So it was only people who filed taxes who were eligible. So the people who needed it most were not being served. So now they are. So they'll be getting this access. And that's in addition, all the other children will be also seeing a boost, you know, who were previously getting some their families were getting some. We're getting, I think, like two thousand dollars a month, they'll now be getting the three thousand to thirty six hundred dollars, not per month, per year, per child. So that's that's also a huge boom to the economy of Texas, right? So and Texas has been in this complicated. You have a lot of loss of women's jobs, but there's also a turn down in the oil and gas. So that's a lot of men's jobs as well. So there's been a sort of it's different from state to state. But yeah, child care vouchers and expanded care are being discussed. Everywhere, I imagine. Naskul, do you have anything to add to that? Perhaps on privatizing the child care, having some more options for parents to choose. Right now, we have like a lack of enough child care in Austin, where I live, perhaps having more like public school or public options for. Mothers or for parents would be something. But I never thought of their child voucher. That sounds like a great idea. It is a bit was not mine. But the other thing that I should mention, though, but it was I liked it. Happy to carry it for that. I should mention about Texas is we have a huge undocumented population who frequently do not have access to benefit. So then you have this whole other issue of poverty that may not be addressed by even a tax credit. So the other side of it is regularizing immigration, which is, you know, it has a direct impact on children and women who are in tech in Houston. Hispanic women are living in poverty, 21 percent, where Hispanic men, 11 percent. So that's huge. And it must be in some. Dimension related to parenthood. So there are a lot of parts of our economy that we don't know about, or we don't care to know about. And that's true for Texas. It's true for other parts of the country, too. But part of doing this kind of feminist analysis of women's participation would also be doing an actual analysis of how the economy works. And what's good and bad about that, you know, not just assume that the old way is the way we have to move forward, but be innovative across the board. The only thing I would jump into add is that I haven't I haven't heard of. I think there's a lot that's still being figured out about these plans. But, you know, one of the sort of thought provocations that I would want to put out there and I would want, you know, people, policymakers to be thinking about and families to be thinking about, like, why as a society do we believe that starting at age five, kids are entitled to a free education. But below five, you are on your own, like that there should be, you know, there are some are existing small subsidies for certain groups. But basically, you know, the idea that everything below five privatize everything above five, you know, again, public the public school system, there's plenty. We could have a whole another conversation about different problems and equities there. But as a society, we've agreed that public school should exist and that there is some government funding for that. So really challenging, like, why do we think it's OK for there to be no support for people who have children under five? A lot of that has to do with our our ambivalence about mothers in the workforce. A lot of this has to do with reinforcement of traditional gender roles. But just assuming that it's OK for this to be a private, you know, that raising children and having children is, you know, a personal hobby akin to windsurfing or something that you should just feel, you know, if you want to invest all that money in, that's up to you is, you know, it's not working as we're seeing from the terrible birth rate. But like, we're basically at a like, you know, society is not going to continue to function if we treat parents like how we're treating them. So it's it's the question is not just about whether or not we're helping parents. The question is ultimately existential about why why we think about these things in this way. Again, may I connect what Catherine said to what Elizabeth earlier called this vicious cycle, right? We don't value those kids education before five and those kids are going to stay behind and they're going to continue being behind. Unfortunately, majority of them are going to be people of color, immigrants, low income. So you see the cycle starts then they're just born not having access to right education. The mother is coming back and forth from three jobs, doesn't have enough time to spend with her kid and the education starts maybe four or five year old. So we are seeing that lacking behind going forward with that. They they just fall unfortunately in that vicious cycle. Now, the attitude seems to be it's your family, it's your problem rather than these are the workers of our society and why and because we value our population, we want to invest in them with make sure they have good food and health care and a good education. Those would be what you would assume a society would want to give to its people from the beginning, as you say, not just when they're five and whether or not they you know, we do see all these people who can afford childcare. Hey, they started three months. So, you know, the school work synchrony model would be eight a.m. to six p.m. from age three to age 18. And you don't have to go to school till six p.m. if you don't want to, but you have that option. So, you know, you don't have to have your kids in summer school, but you have that option. So, you know, I calculated it currently in the setup of the school day. Children are in school during the work hours over the course of their lifetime between zero and 18 37% of the time. So, because of, you know, all the five first five years, the three months off every year in the summer to 30, they get out of school and then they're all those random days. Call me service days. You know, it's like what who do you think is going to be taking care of these children? If you had a fully synchronous program, you'd have hundreds of thousands of extra jobs. You would be taking people out of dependency, but you'd also be allowing people to like get their homework done before they go home and spend more positive time with their, with their families when they get there, you know, they're just a lot of ways you could restructure the school day. And I know that one of the other areas that people are looking at now with the school district money is expanding after school offerings so that they do go from 230 to six. And if you made that available universal, that would be transformative also. And if, you know, I don't think they're going to be able to gear up for this summer. But if they start thinking about, you know, how do we offer an enrichment program over the summer that also keeps up with learning loss, you know, on does that, how positive would that be for millions of people? Because it's not the case that everybody is in camp, you know, over the summer in some idealized universe where they're all out in Elizabeth, what you're talking is exactly the feminist ethics of care where we are being seen and interconnectedness of our identities. And you, if you are better, I'm going to be better. But that's not the system is not working. We need women like you, women who believe in this way of thinking in a policy making in a decision making level. And that's why I'm still believing this is a structure. We can like do all of these little things change these leaders, but we need to get women and men at the same time change their ideas about this gender relations. And I think the pandemic, you're right. If it is an opportunity, those tax credit, all of these changes that we're making are going to take us. But I think we might need more revolutionary, perhaps feminist ethics in our society. I'm here for it. I'm here for the revolution. You know, we're talking a lot about, you know, that this is an opportunity like the pandemic has has exposed so many of the issues that we had within childcare, within gender roles in the home. You know, the childcare aspect of everything is, is, you know, something that largely we're going to have to trust our state government or federal government to fix. But within the homes and seeing this unpaid work, the distribution of that when it when it comes to childcare, we have talked a lot about how care for older family members also usually falls on women. What can be done even within the homes like smaller conversations, anything to start to correct that. And, and also how do from your research from speaking with with mothers who have gone through this who have had the burnout, do you think is that shifting? Did the pandemic exposed to maybe husbands that there is a real shift that needs to happen here? And also before I let y'all answer that, I'd like to remind people that we do want to leave some time at the end for Q&As, you can go ahead and start dropping questions in that box and I'll be able to see them. But yeah, what can we do about all of this? I have many, I have many thoughts on this at a very prescient move in the end of 2019, the double shift, we did an entire series on the idea that the revolution begins at home and that we can't see changes in the world until we see changes in our own home lives. And what a what a I was really excited about that pre pandemic. And I feel like, you know, the pandemic has only further exposed that I think. So the number one best resource on this topic is a book by my friend Eve Rodsky called Fair Play. And the idea around Fair Play is that all time is equal and that in a relationship, if someone makes more money, it doesn't mean that their time is inherently more valuable in a relationship. And she has a lot of very concrete ways to think about dividing time in partnerships in the home. But I think that I think that, you know, one of the things I don't think this is nest, I think, you know, for example, in academia, this sort of time during the pandemic of like more being at home, like men are publishing at a much higher rate than women because they are not taking on more care giving. There's the reports about working from home where men like are much more likely to say it has had no negative impact on their productivity where women are reporting the opposite. So I think that a lot of this, you know, again, whatever individual systems we had and supports and outsourcing that white color women had to sort of skate by have fallen away. And I think that basically, you know, people who, you know, who, you know, have setups in their home, men who have setups in their home where they get more leisure time and they don't, you know, maybe we say we want to spend more time with kids, but maybe they don't want to spend more time cleaning the bathroom and folding laundry. Like that's not they don't find that enjoyable. They're benefiting from that unpaid labor for that someone else is doing. So I think having very, very challenging conversations in our own homes and also, you know, thinking more expansively about, you know, why, why are we so committed to the nuclear family as an ideal? Like that's not how most people that's not how we've raised families for most of human history. Like why can we think more expansively about extended families and communities and co-housing and all these different things. So I think it's not only about personal negotiation, but also about how can we, you know, create legal statuses for, you know, families that have more than two parents and all this sort of thing. So I'm totally down for these conversations. And I think, you know, just negotiating who's doing what is really only the beginning of these very, very tough conversations that we need to be having as a society. I agree. I agree. I'm going to talk a little bit about the story of the destroyed Catherine and I can bring up two stories from these women. Rosa, she is a restaurant worker and she is a single mom of two kids. She lives in El Paso and she lives with her mother and the mother is doing that childcare so she has an essential worker can go work in the back of the restaurant. So what you're saying exactly matches what we are saying. Remember, Maryam in Austin with the same education and a paid a scale at her husband. She had those difficult conversation with her husband and her husband was like, tell me, let's have a schedule. Let's have items that I do and items you do. So maybe perhaps we can have a public education system. Elizabeth, maybe it is there in other countries that they are happier than us or ranked more happy in the ranking of the cities or countries or right in the world scale. What are they doing that they are able to share those unpaid domestic and childcare in a more equal way or at least more enjoyable way. Elizabeth, right? Well, are they doing it? Some countries do have structures that award leave on a structured basis, right? Where you do have a requirement that men and women equally participate. There was, I remember a few decades back, I mean, I don't remember literally, but I have seen that there was a discussion of writing up contracts, right? Where you divide household work. And then this is immediately it was suggested it was mocked as, oh, these feminists are there just too, you know, that's not the way real life is. People don't live by a contract. But why not? I mean, in a basic way, you can divide up tasks and just not do them if they aren't your tasks. Just don't just say, okay, well, they didn't do it. I'll do it. You know, just don't do it. And have that difficult dynamic. But I think you can't have it just in the familial situation. You also have to have it reinforced by social structures that indicate that there actually is positive respect and endorsement you know, that people will maybe get paid more for not being productive during the pandemic in their academic point system. I don't know. Because that shows you were actually doing more. You were probably doing all that childbearing. But where you change the way things are recognized. Jumping back to what Elizabeth and Catherine both said there are several already several publications about how women academics have not been either publishing as much as their male colleagues or being conducting laboratory research. And guess what? It's not just the childcare. We in our universities, they care for graduate students and undergraduate students is definitely feminized, right? We all experienced it. Most of the students come to female professors to get the care to be heard to be helped out about something outside the classroom. So that's again, feminization of the care in all aspects of that. And Elizabeth, I would love to see an example of that contract between a partner's how they did it and are they still together or what happened? They divorce shortly thereafter. But that was back in the 60s. I think I can find it and send it to you. Yeah, I mean, it's across the board and status is hugely important at every level and particularly reinforcements for impoverished women are the the step that is key. But the same dynamic occurs at all at all levels. And you know here in our state, we have other kinds of dynamics of lack of support that we need to rethink, right? So we have particular problems around support for health care, support for fair wages and support for reproductive health access, which is also part of a property manufacturing machine, you know, so if you don't have access to birth control and abortion, then you are more likely to be in a cycle of poverty as are your children. And these dynamics have to be discussed also as part of a larger entity of lack of support, so or system of lack of support. So as a state, we have particular concerns, but these are echoed throughout the United States. So they're parallel. It's a great segue to a question from our audience and you already started to answer this Elizabeth, but we have a question, what can or should Texas parents ask their lawmakers to do to expand our social safety net, either on a state or city level? To expand the social safety network, well there are so many ways. So currently they could stop trying to limit access to reproductive health care and clinics and things like that, or they skipped an opportunity to expand the Medicaid option under the affordable care act that was actually offered by a partisan set of legislators and you know, it's still time. It could happen again, I suppose as was noted, you know, there's such inequitable education system in our state. We rank 42nd in terms of investment in education and a lot of the highly paid jobs here are filled by people from other states where they do invest in education and Texans don't get the benefit of their own state's economy thriving. So that's another area. You know, there are just so many issues, regularizing wages around immigration. Huge issue has to be done in collaboration with the feds, but if you want equity you have to recognize that there are huge numbers of workers who are doing making the workforce, the cost of living lower. Everybody takes that work for granted and then castigates the people at the same time but there has to be some real addressing of that. Access to free good child care fix the criminal justice system in so many ways. You could talk to your talk to your and they all affect the economy and not just the gender roles of women, but also the gender roles of men that are also limiting. If there's something, Dad, just to note that we only have about two minutes left, I wish we could do this for another 30 minutes, but I just wanted to jump on Elizabeth listed so many great causes and sometimes people can feel overwhelmed. There's so many issues I could possibly get involved with. What I have seen from listeners, the double shift community listeners and stuff and heard from other moms, especially moms were stretch really thin. We can't take on all these issues, but find what your issue is. It's around your local school board, whether it's around universal child care in your county, whether it's a specific bill in the legislature and really get involved in that. You can't fix everything, but get some friends involved too so you don't feel like you're doing it alone. If there's something that really speaks to you, find that issue and stick with it. That is how we make change over time. We can't fix everything in one fell swoop, but it's okay to do that. We need to focus on this working with my community, to address these efforts and really focusing on these issues in an ongoing way does make a difference. Those mothers that Catherine said had focus on one specific subject. I would like to see a change in a specific policy how does concretely change that mother's life or her children life. to real life experiences. It's going to change your life in this way and that way with solid facts and numbers. So other women who might not be interested in getting politically active can see the result in their own life and be more inclined to join their movement perhaps. Great advice everyone. Well, I wanna thank all of you again, Nazgul, Catherine, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for being with me here today and thank you so much for inviting us and hosting this panel. This is a great discussion, obviously a lot to talk about here, but I loved hearing from all of you. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much.