Q&A: Jessica Calarco on ‘how women became America’s safety net’

abcnews.go.com:

Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs like sick time, vacation time and health care

CHICAGO — Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs like sick time, vacation time and health care. For decades, American women have filled the gaps, to the detriment of themselves and their families, according to sociologist Jessica Calarco.

Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies inequalities in family life and education. She is also the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” published last month.

More than two-thirds of Americans’ unpaid caregiving work — valued at $1 trillion annually — is done by women, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families based on 2023 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Calarco discusses her book and explains why women in the U.S. bear the brunt of prohibitively expensive high-quality daycare, limited government assistance and inaccessible paid maternal leave in the wake of the pandemic and beyond. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A: The gist of the book is that other countries have invested in social safety nets as a way to help people manage risk.

In the U.S., we’ve instead tried to DIY society. We left it up to individual people to manage risk on their own, as opposed to allowing them to rely on a social safety net. And in practice, that means keeping taxes low, especially on wealthy people and corporations, cutting regulations and really underinvesting in the kinds of time and resources that people would need to be able to