 Well, hello and welcome to another crisis conversation live from the Better Life Lab. I'm Bridget Schulte. I'm the director of the Better Life Lab, the Work Family Justice and Gender Equity Program at New America. I am thrilled to have this conversation today where we'll be talking about the pandemic and what this means for women. Will this really set women back a generation? As many have been, if you look at the data, you look at unemployment numbers and who's dropping out or being pushed out, particularly when you look at the fall. As so many schools did not open up again and you look at unemployment numbers, women were unprecedented numbers of women were literally pushed out of the workforce because of a lack of child care. You know, some have said it's not a matter of whether women will be set back, but just how far, five, 10, 15 years. So that's what we're going to talk about today. How is the pandemic? How is that impacting women, working mothers? All mothers are working mothers, mothers who work outside the home for pay. How is that impacting women and mothers? And more importantly, what do we do? What have we learned and what needs to change in the future? So we're not in this situation again. So I'd like to briefly introduce my guests and then we'll just dive right into the conversation. And as in all of our live conversations, we welcome your questions, your comments. We welcome you to share your story. So please feel free to leave us a message in the chat to say I have a question. We can bring you live. We can ask your question. If you have a story you want to share, this is part of what we're here to do is create this space where we can really dig into these issues. So joining me today, we've got Bryce Covert. She's a journalist and author and she most recently wrote, the economy could lose a generation of working mothers. So we're going to be talking to her about some of the reporting and research she's been doing on that subject. You've got Jessica Calarco. She's an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University who studies inequalities in family life and education. She's done a number of pandemic related research studies, which include my husband thinks I'm crazy and let's not pretend it's fun. I think many people can relate to those titles. And finally we have Carrie McCracken. She's a mother of five who was recently pushed out of the workforce and a career she loved because of a lack of childcare. So Carrie, let's start with you. Tell us your story. So you had this career that you loved. You have these five kids. What was happening in the pandemic? What led you to the decision to finally see I can't make it work? I have to leave work. So I worked in the beverage industry and when the pandemic hit, it pretty much halted any business we had just because a lot of restaurants were closed and businesses were closing down schools. So there was really no need to have us up and running to the extent that we were. So I was furloughed in early April and then during that time frame, my kids were sent home to do NTI, which is your non-traditional learning. They were doing that for the remainder of the school year. In June, I was asked to come back to work. I had still had my kiddos doing a little bit of schoolwork at that point because it was early in June. So I asked. Go ahead. I was just going to say, Carrie, so how like the ages of your kids, like what ages are they and like, you know, how intensive was that kind of homeschooling that you needed to do? And then you also said that you're in the beverage industry. Just tell us what that means. Yeah. So the beverage industry, I worked for Coca-Cola consolidated. So I worked various leadership roles with my timeframe, with my time with them. So I worked multiple sales roles. The most current role I had, I worked in manufacturing, remanufacturing facility as an operation supervisor. And so that was the last position I had. As far as my children, I have five kids. My oldest is 12 now. I have a nine-year-old, a seven-year-old, a three-year-old, and a two-year-old. Wow. All of them need a lot of care and supervision, yeah. Yes. And then with the schooling, they have Google Classroom and they have some availability to their teachers. But a lot of it is put on the parent. They have assignments, but just think of when your children are in school, they're raising their hands for the teacher, especially my younger ones. And that's where I play the teacher. So I was a teacher for the whole time I was furloughed. And so it was great that it kind of worked out the way it did, because I'm not sure how it would have went if I wasn't available. I don't know what we would have done for the kids' schooling, because it is a lot to take on. And so, you know, kids were out for the summer. I got a call back from furlough and the conversation was that I was being let go. My position was being eliminated due to the business needs changing. And I had a conversation with my boss just to kind of talk about other positions available and to see kind of where we go from there. And I was asked, if we can save your job, when can you return? And so I kind of gave an estimate, because I thought in the back of my mind, I could call around, see, you know, where childcare is. At the time, I wasn't exactly aware of how bad it was in the state of Kentucky, based off of the restrictions and the guidelines that our governor had put in place. And so I, you know, I gave him the timeframe. My boss called me back and said, great, on a Thursday, I need you to come in on Monday. And so I was like, I was excited because, you know, I loved the company. I loved my job. I was so excited to have a job still. And then it kind of hit me once I started calling around for childcare that this is not possible. Our childcare centers were operating at 15 to 20% capacity, which means there's no hope if you're someone new coming in. And so unfortunately, I had to make that call and talk to my boss about it. She wasn't available. So I called HR and they had told me that I didn't qualify for FMLA. So my next option was what we call personal leave. So our company had in place this policy where you could request a personal leave. It's unpaid, which I was okay with. You could request a personal leave. Typically it's 30 days, but depending on the circumstances, you can extend it out. It's just manager's discretion. I had approved multiple personal leaves during my time in leadership. So I had no concern about it being approved. I thought, oh my goodness, this will help me keep my job, but also be able to support my children until we can kind of figure out what the next step is with them. And unfortunately, that didn't happen. I received a letter overnighted to me the following Tuesday saying that had I not returned to work that week that I would be considered voluntarily resigned. Wow. No communication, nothing. So you can't find childcare, you're stuck, there's nothing to do. And your job says come back or else we think that you have resigned. And so then that means that you can't get unemployment benefits, right? How does that then affect what happens to you if you don't go back? So for the state of Kentucky, I have been able to collect unemployment due to some of the things that the governor has put in place. So I am grateful for that. I don't know how long that will last, but that is nowhere near what I was making. So it's great that I'm able to stay home with the kids, but we do have to cut back on things in a lifestyle that we had. And at the end of the day, I'm grateful that we can put a roof over ahead and food on the table and give our kids things. But we've had to cut back. Well, Bryce, I want to come to you in a minute. But Carrie, I think the question that I want to ask you that I think that the entire nation wants to ask all couples is why you? Why were you the one that dropped out of the workforce? What was the discussion like with your husband or your partner? Why is it that women are bearing the brunt of the lack of childcare? Why is that not shared more fairly or more equally? What was the case in your situation? I know for me, I didn't really have a notice to necessarily have that quick conversation with my husband, per se, because I was literally given two days to figure out what to do. But kind of after the fact, my husband and I spoke about it and my husband makes over double what my salary was. And so for us, it's a survival, it goes into survival mode, because yes, I could figure out how to keep my job. But then what do we do? You know, how do we make ends meet? Because I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to afford my mortgage. I couldn't pay the bills to any extent that we have been able to so far. And I wouldn't provide for my family the way that we've been able to. You know, and so it would be great if he was able to take that leave. But financially, it just wasn't even an option. So. Yeah, well, you know, Bryce, let's go to you at this point. What are you know, does Carrie's story sound familiar? What are you seeing and you're reporting? And I'm so struck that, you know, how how so many threads come into these decisions. And we've got the gender pay gap. We've got men who are in professions that are just paid more than the professions that women are in. There's all sorts of kind of financial forces that that that come into making these decisions and then really end up falling into on women's shoulders. What are can can you tell us about some of the reporting research you've been doing? Yeah, I've been speaking to women, Carrie and others about what they've been through, how they came to these decisions or in some cases, you know, like Carrie's not even really a choice. You know, I think we're talking about women dropping out of the labor force. But for many, this is really getting shoved out of the labor force. So much as I play here, I mean, the gender wage gap is certainly playing a role. Women on average across the country who work full time, make less than their male counterparts. That's even more true. Women of color, black women, Hispanic women are making even less. When two people in a heterosexual couple sit down and look at the finances, usually it's women's jobs that are the ones that have to go if they have to choose one. I also think there's other structural things that are facing them. I mean, you heard how Carrie's job reacted when she asked for some unpaid time off to try to figure it out and just wasn't met halfway. I think that's true at a lot of workplaces where even in this pandemic, when we're going through such unprecedented dilemmas, a lot of workplaces still are not willing to budge. And I think particularly asking for time away from work to deal with child cares is especially stereotyped and demean. And then, of course, on an even larger level, there's what the federal government has done and Congress enacted an extension of paid leave for people to deal with the pandemic, particularly for parents whose children were out of daycare or out of school because they closed during the pandemic. And yet they wrote it so narrowly that only about 20 percent of people were able to qualify. Carrie told me she couldn't because her employer was too large. They cut out all employers, over 500 employees. They cut out all employers under 50 at first. Nearly every health care worker was exempt. So it was a great idea and yet it had very little teeth. And also now it was about 10 to 12 weeks, depending on how you used it, we're running out. You know, it's we're heading into a spring where it doesn't look any better than it did at the beginning of this year. I don't know what people are going to do. And then, of course, there's just the way we've all been socialized to assume that women are the default caretakers. You know, I do think fathers these days do a lot more caregiving than generations past, but that is ingrained. Societal expectation is really hard to reverse on your own. I had women who just sort of said to me, I felt like this was my thing. You know, the kids being home, that was my job to take on. And I think that's a really strong force and one that's really hard. It's a tie that's really hard to row against. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and you were talking about the paid family leave, sort of these emergency provision that is so narrow that it didn't really help as many people as it could have or should have. It also expires at the end of this year. Isn't that right? So coming Jan come January, if there isn't an extension or a bailout, you know, you know, what could what what does the winter and spring look like for for women working mothers and people with caregiving responsibilities? It's going to be bleak. I mean, at the end of this year, there's really a huge cliff of lots of things expiring, not just the paid leave, but also on expanded unemployment benefits will be cut off. And Congress did say that people who had to leave work because of caregiving should be able to get expanded unemployment benefits. But again, that expires at the end of December. You know, back in the spring, we didn't think this was going to last so long. Certainly, I understand why Congress wasn't thinking over a year ahead. But here we are. This is only getting worse. This pandemic is raging across the country. And Congress is stalled. President Trump does not seem interested in doing much of anything. And certainly, President-elect Biden does, but he doesn't take office until the 20th of January. So we've got a lot of time where we have to figure out what people are going to do. Right. Well, Jessica, let's go to you at this point. You know, this is an area that you have specialized in looking at deeply before the pandemic. What are you know, what is your research showing kind of help help put stories like Carey's and Bryce's reporting put us in a larger context. What is what is your research showing? Sure. So one of the things that we've found most strongly during the pandemic is that women's lives have been disrupted in such deep and powerful ways that the normal routines that we rely on for our mental health, for our well-being have just been completely shattered in terms of child care, in terms of the way that we work, in terms of having even access to jobs. And so in the wake of those kinds of and we have long existed in the society that doesn't provide women the safety net that they need. And if anything, women are the safety net that we have for this society to manage the kinds of social support that we need for organizations and for individual families. And so with things like child care disrupted and with things like work disrupted, women are trying to hold everything together. And because of those societal expectations, they're often the ones who feel the most pressured to step in and fill that gap. And then because of things like the gender wage gap, it seems to make sense for women to be the ones to play that role. And because of the norms that we have, it makes sense for them to that they quote unquote know better how to run the household, how to take care of the kids, how to do the learning at home. And so I think it's important to think about how this is an extension and an expansion of the inequalities that have long existed in our society and the kinds of unpaid, unvalued labor that disproportionately women and especially women of color are doing in our society to care for others and to make sure that society is able to operate smoothly. You know, the titles of some of your research, I was sort of checking about them. You know, can you tell us like one or two some of the top findings like, you know, my husband thinks I'm crazy. Sure. What are you finding out there? So that research is essentially, I mean, so it's interviews and surveys with mothers about their experiences during the pandemic. And what we find in that paper is that disruptions, pandemic related disruptions are increasing conflict within couples, both exacerbating long standing conflicts related to pandemic parenting in terms of mothers' perceptions that even though in some cases dads are stepping up to do more, it's just not enough to make up for the excess burden of pandemic parenting and leading mothers to rely on antidepressants to turn to counseling, to turn to alcohol or food in some cases and dropping out of the workforce as a way to reduce those conflicts that they're experiencing within the home. And then also we find in that paper, too, and this is where that my husband thinks I'm crazy quote comes from. Some of those conflicts are also coming from couples disagreeing about the pandemic with male partners in many cases doubting women's concerns about the virus and telling them that it's not as serious as they think it is. And what that ends up doing is pushing mothers to do even more of the work of keeping their family safe. They're the ones who have to do all of the extra cleaning and shopping and making sure that their family is staying safe and in social distance and wearing masks while also trying to convince their partners to do the same thing as well. The quote comes from an ICU nurse who has seen patients die of COVID-19 and yet her husband refuses to wear a mask and take the pandemic seriously. And so she was deeply frustrated with him during the pandemic. And so that's kind of the gist of that paper. The other paper, let's not pretend it's fun. That's a quote that that paper looks at how increased pandemic parenting responsibilities are impacting mothers' health and well-being. Essentially, we find that mothers who've had their child care access disrupted either through schools closing or through child cares shutting down are substantially increasing the amount of time that they're spending caring for their kids and that those increases are related to substantial increases in stress, anxiety and frustrations with their children. And so that that mom was talking to us about how her mother-in-law kept saying, you should really enjoy this time with your kids at home. You have all this extra time with your kids and she was saying, that's not realistic. This can't be fun. She was working from home full time while also trying to care for her kids full time. Her husband was also working from home full time. But even his help that he was able to provide was just not enough to reduce the stress that she was experiencing in that process. Wow. I think that that leads us perfectly into let's bring in some of the participants. They've got some stories and questions that they want to share. Let's go to Yana next. Yana, can we bring you on? And I think that your question is perfectly timed to where the conversation is right now. She wants to talk about rage. Hi, good morning. Can you guys hear me OK? Yeah, we can hear you fine. Oh, perfect. Hi. Thank you again, Bridget, for putting this together. And I've been really enjoying this talk that you guys have been holding on a regular basis, so we appreciate it. So my question is the simmering rage that I'm feeling on a daily basis, both as a mother, as a wife, as a worker. And again, this is coming from a place of extreme privilege where I am able to work from home. I have kept my job. I've actually got promoted in this and I'm able to spend extra time with my 10 month old. We have a lot of help from my family, but at the same time, there's this underlying anger of almost kind of like finally having my eyes open about the fact that the system is just not set up for women, not set up for parents, not set up for mothers. And, you know, again, I have the privilege of having a therapist. So there's a lot of that happening every two weeks or so. And so it's a two full question, I guess, is just like, how do we deal with this rage? But the second part of it is how do we channel that in order to make structural change in this country? Because I think so much of it, and I think you guys have talked upon it, is America has a very good way of making you feel like the problems that you are having are your individual problem. If you just do X, if you just do Y, you can do it. Right. And it sort of diminishes. Exactly. If it diminishes the structural change of this country, it has not been made for women to enter the workforce, because who's going to take care of the children? Because we haven't had a seat at the table. Right. So yeah, so that's great. So, so Carrie, I would like to go to you and say, does that does that resonate that sense of rage? And, you know, and then what do you know, what do you do with it? And then, and Bryce, I saw you nodding. So after Carrie, let's let's go to you. Like, what, you know, how do we stack up with other countries? How are they managing through the pandemic? Are you know, Jessica as well, are they managing better because they support families better? Are women in a better position? But Carrie, let's first start start with you. Does that does that sound? Does that resonate the sense of resentment or rage or, you know, and kind of who are you? Where? Where does the rage go? Absolutely, there is rage there. And I think it continues to get stronger as we see more women have the same issue. And this is not just an opinion. There are statistics out there that are showing it. And it's beyond me that no one is speaking up about this and raising their hand. I mean, I know for me, personally, I work so hard to get where I was in my career. I worked in an industry that was literally male and so to be a woman and to be successful was just it was amazing. And so now it's like you're taken off of that. And I didn't have a choice. And so it's frustrating. And, you know, the thing that I can do at the end of the day is to put my voice out there to speak up. And you know what, there may not be very many people that, you know, hear it, but at least my voice is heard. And that there are resources out there for people. For me, I reached out to a better balance, which was an amazing resource. It was someone who I could vent to and they were so understanding and could give me additional resources. So I was grateful for them. But there's definitely a rage there and it will continue because it's not getting any better. And the stress is through the roof. My children, we were just told on Tuesday that my kids were going back to virtual learning today. So I now have all five kids at home full time again. Four of my five are in school. So it's going to be a complete madhouse again, where we had just a little bit of a break as of Monday. It's complete chaos again. It's all back. So so so, Bryce, you are you are nodding. You are shaking your head vigorously. I am also angry. I mean, I think everybody has been going through quite a lot emotionally, but someone and I'm so sorry, I can't cite who they were. But someone said, basically, mothers have become the shock absorbers of this pandemic. I think so much has been placed on them. I do think, like Carrie said, channeling that rage into speaking up is such a valuable thing to do. I also very much hope that as we come out of this whenever we do, we don't forget what we've been through. Yana, like you said, I think a lot of people are having this realization that we have basically just lifted the pretense that this wasn't a problem. This was always a problem. We never had adequate child care. We never had adequate paid leave. But now it's reached such a crisis boiling point. It's very plain that when you don't have these things, people can't live their lives. They can't pursue their dreams. They can't go to work. I really hope we remember that and work to change it. You know, we always needed better child care. We need to do something about that after the pandemic. We haven't guaranteed paid leave. We need to do that after the pandemic. So that's where I'm hoping the rage can go. In the meantime, the way I channel it is, I call my governor and I yell at him every so often. I yell at his voicemail. I should say no one ever picks up. So well, at this point, you know, we're we're coming down on time. We've got some other questions. Let me wrap some in and kind of go to I want. I want to ask each of you for some sort of closing thoughts. You know, what do we do from here? How do we channel this rage, you know, this this this real grotesque unfairness, you know, this real inequality that then is just worse once you factor, you know, intersectional and race in class in there. How do we move forward? So, Jessica, I want to start with you, you know, and some of the questions from the from the chat and I'm sorry, we didn't get to all of them. As you can tell, there's just a lot of interest in this. You know, some of the questions are around. What about federal direct payments to caregivers as a solution? You know, there are other thoughts about what if there's a better plan be rather than leaving the workforce? Do you hire a one on one digital learning supervisor? Do you join a pod? But then obviously that means you've got to have some resources. You know, questions about, you know, are there employer sponsored child care? Is there anybody doing this? Well, you know, and then, you know, I think, again, looking, are there other countries that have figured this out where women are not, you know, are not the shock absorbers, where mothers are not the shock absorbers, the way they are here. So, Jessica, kind of taking some of these some of these questions and comments, what do we do? Where do we go? Yeah, I mean, thinking about Yana's comments, this this rage actually makes me somewhat hopeful. So many of the moms that we talked to early in the pandemic talked about feeling like failures, feeling like failures as workers and as mothers. And that's a function of the fact that in the U.S. we treat societal problems as individual problems and we ignore the structural roots of these inequalities. And I'm hopeful that this rage means that we are starting to recognize that these problems go beyond us as individuals and require more systemic and systematic solutions that go beyond just even changing individual employer policies. We know, for example, that that only about 13 percent of workers right now have access to paid leave after after childbirth. And those are almost all elite workers in our society. So leaving it up to even individual employers is just not enough to be able to tackle the huge inequalities, the racial inequalities and the socioeconomic inequalities that exist with respect to care. And so I think the more that we can think about solutions like what we see in other countries in terms of affordable affordable childcare, in terms of decoupling things like the ability to put food on the table and the ability to have health care from employment, making sure that families have access to expanded unemployment, not just in the short term and not just in the wake of the pandemic, but really seeing that this is necessary as a buffer for families because hard times happen and they shouldn't be reliant on the generosity of a particular state or a particular employer to help them get through. So I think the more that we can think about calling our governors, calling our representatives to say we need systemic solutions banding together as mothers, forming caucuses, forming groups within organizations to demand better solutions from the people who have the power to provide it and also not putting it on women to have to be the ones to do that work, but expecting men to step up and do that work instead. Yeah, Bryce, again, I've been seeing some vigorous head nodding. What do we do with the rage? So you call your governor and leave messages. What, you know, is this the beginning of like, you know, kind of activating parents? Is that I hope it is. I mean, people always ask me why isn't there a parents movement? And I answer because parents are extremely busy. But maybe this is the beginning of a parents movement. And I very much hope that, you know, everything that Jessica just laid out is what's on the agenda of the parents movement. But I also want to point out that we don't have to wait for sort of longer term, larger scale change. There are things we could and should be doing right now that we are not we could prioritize keeping schools and keeping daycares open safely if we also said that was a priority and looked at potentially closing restaurants, closing bars, not doing indoor dining, not allowing gyms, not allowing movie theaters, paying those businesses so they don't go under paying their employees so that they have a financial lifeline. These are choices we could make right now that would give everybody what they need. It would give children what they need and it would give parents what they need. And you asked about other countries. Other countries are doing this. France, Germany, Ireland have all prioritized schools and said that they will try to keep them open and put the restrictions for this second or third wave, whatever wave we're in on the nonessential businesses. We're not doing that here. I'm in New York and I'm extremely frustrated because in my city, we're about to shut public schools while we still have indoor dining. That has our priorities all backward. Yeah. Yeah. Carrie, let's go to you for the final word. What do you need? What do we need to do? How do we move forward and really address these deep-seated inequalities moving forward? I think, you know, we're going through a pandemic right now, but, you know, this isn't going to be the last pandemic that we go through during our lifetimes. And so I think that there needs to be more support out there, not even just from a federal level, but from a state level. And then I think that there needs to be laws in place, you know, just as we were talking about, you know, maternity leave and things like that. There are corporations that even my husband that offer paternity leave. We can't even get maternity leave and just some businesses alone. But other corporations are offering paternity leave. It's just it blows my mind. And I think that we need to have more people and I'm sorry, corporations that are offering this type of leave assistance, you know, I'm not sure what the timeframe would be. But I think once someone starts that, I think that other companies will follow because that's a benefit to me. If I had a corporation that would allow me time off for, you know, a situation with my children, if something happens, that is so great. That I mean, I would be on board immediately and I would know that that company cared about me as a mom, not as just I'm another number because that's that's what I feel like. So I think at the end of the day, I think we need to continue to speak up and get this story out there and not just leave it as is. I think if you continue to talk about it, more people are going to have awareness of it. And then I think that's going to make our voice even louder where we think about it. All right, well, I love that. Well, here we've done our part of speaking out and we'll continue to do that at the Better Life Lab. I appreciate. Thank you so much to our guests, our panelists today. Thank you for sharing your your stories, your research, your insight. Thank you so much for the participants. What a wonderful and lively chat. I'm so sorry we weren't able to get to all of it. And I think Jessica, people were asking about some of your research. So if you could send me those links and we'll send it out in a follow up email to everyone, Bryce will send some of your links to your stories as well. So again, thank you all for participating. I'd also like to thank the New America Events Team. They always take such great care of us. You know, my wonderful Better Life Lab team and, you know, David Shulman, who's just a magical producer. Thank you all for helping us bring these conversations to continue them in the midst of this pandemic. Next month we'll be back where we've taken a look back. We've been doing crisis conversations pretty much weekly and monthly since the end of March. So we'll be looking at lessons learned and what is the bold agenda moving forward? What do we need to do to change in the short and long term? So we hope that you'll come back next month. In the meantime, stay safe, wash your hands, wear a mask, and we'll see you in a month.