--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2.3 million women left the workforce. In January, women's participation in the labor force hit its lowest level since 1988. And right now, as the economy slowly recovers, so many women are struggling to find a way back in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, we're looking at a series from New York Magazine's The Cut. It's about how the pandemic has forced many women to make difficult decisions about how they work. And it's very appropriately called All Work, No Pay.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This was a year that really shattered our reality. And I think it would be a huge shame if the pandemic ended and we did not see substantial policy changes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jen Gann is the features editor at The Cut, who oversaw this series.
--:-- Jen Gann: The way this series arose was we were watching the jobs reports every month. We were writing up news stories on them. Women of color, disabled women, we knew they were faring worse. And we had originally thought about trying to assign one big sweeping piece that could address this story. And we very quickly realized that one piece was not the way to do it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of the pieces in the series are deeply personal essays, and some of them are reported features. You'll find a little bit of dark comedy in there at times. Women who acknowledge the impossibility of it all with a slight wink.
--:-- Jen Gann: And then there's this one article. It's a first-person account from a single mom named Tara.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories from the series. Before the pandemic, things were really looking up for Tara. She had left a relationship where there was domestic violence. She had gotten a new place. She was working. She had a new baby. She was busy. But things were going pretty well.
--:-- Jen Gann: And then the pandemic hit. And she had a job where she was required to make, I believe it was upwards of 50 phone calls a day. And she was in a small apartment with a 10-year-old and a new baby. With the homeschooling, the online learning, the baby who needed her attention. Exactly. And she didn't have any other options. It was her and her kids. And eventually her employer, who had claimed they were going to be sympathetic, ran out of sympathy and she lost her job.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What really struck me about this particular as told to was Tara's voice in it. She mentions she turned 40 this year. Her daughter turned 10. These are these big milestones for a person. And here she was in a pandemic with two young kids.
--:-- Jen Gann: She says the only person I had to talk to was a 10, but she was my 10. And that line has really stuck with me, like this very fierce declaration of love for her child.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, another thing that she said in that piece that I remember is, your job doesn't understand that you have kids and your kids don't understand that you have a job. Which, when I read that, I was like, wow, that's a line that's, I'm sure, so relatable to so many working parents right now.
--:-- Jen Gann: One hundred percent. While we all wish that our jobs understood we had kids, we don't want our kids to feel the weight of our jobs. We just need them to support those kids.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jen is a working parent herself, and she says she had a connection to one piece in this series in particular.
--:-- Jen Gann: One of the pieces that's pretty dear to my heart is a feature by Julie Kim that we called The Mothers Who Already Left.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Julie Kim was a busy working mother of one when she had her second daughter, Izzy. And about a year and a half into Izzy's life, she was diagnosed with a severe genetic disorder. That means she's pretty disabled and requires a lot of care.
--:-- Jen Gann: So through a series of gradual decisions, Julie and her husband decided that she would be the one to really cut back her work until she wasn't doing any paid work at all. And this was pre-pandemic. This was pre-pandemic, yes. This was not something that Julie ever foresaw for herself. She always envisioned continuing with her career.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But pre-pandemic, they just could not figure out how to make this work. And she has since found a community of other women in her position who for various reasons work much less than they thought they would or not at all. And what she offers is a lens into that experience that other women who have left the workforce in the pandemic and left isn't the right word all of them are forced out quite frankly she offers a lens into the experience of what that's like to wrestle with losing that aspect of herself and to be faced with full-time care.
--:-- Jen Gann: Yeah. Why was it important to you to include this perspective in a series about how the pandemic has affected women and working women?
--:-- Shamita Basu: So I have a child who's medically complex, and ever since he was born, I get questions like, would I ever consider cutting back on working? Would I go part-time? Would I leave my job if I could to take care of him? And he's doing quite well these days. You know, he needs some extra care, but he's doing quite well. And I have noticed for years, my husband never gets that question. Not once. I get it pretty regularly, though.
--:-- Jen Gann: And I think there is something that the pandemic especially has shown us about how we really need to interrogate that question Why is it the woman that that level of care falls to Even though women's voices and perspectives were really centered in this series, there's one piece where a man's perspective is included. It's a conversation between a husband and a wife about how they reached the decision that she would be the one to stay home with the kids when remote schooling started again this past September.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What we really wanted to get in there was the voice of the husband, because many times in pieces about women making the quote unquote choice to step away from work, we have their voices in there. Maybe they mention a husband who's not quite up to the task or who they don't feel is suited to take care of kids all day. But we don't often get to hear the husband thinking through things out loud.
--:-- Jen Gann: And in that piece in particular, the woman made less money. So there were a lot of things that her husband said that might not pass this sort of feminist muster, but she got paid less. And at the end of the day, they had to make a decision. It's what social scientists call a constrained choice, which is not really a choice at all. Someone has to take care of the kids. It's probably going to be the person who makes less money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think, too, women are tired. It's very tiring to have those kind of conversations within a relationship as much as you might want to have it. At the end of the day, I don't think I'm alone and just wanting to go to bed.
--:-- Jen Gann: Yeah, I don't think you're alone at all.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, I have to tell you, as a 30-year-old working woman, nothing hits home quite like a series all about how the promises and assurances that were made to working women of our generation are all sort of slowly sinking into the sea.
--:-- Jen Gann: I'm wondering if after doing this series and curating these different perspectives on this moment, do you feel any cause for optimism here? And I fully understand the answer might be no.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If there's any hope for optimism, I'm in my mid-30s. I would hope that women younger than me are going into their work lives with their eyes open.
--:-- Jen Gann: I personally am in the camp that Angela Garbes, who wrote our anchor essay for this package, is in, where the experience of the pandemic, for me, is more of a personal recalibration.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What Jen is referring to there is a really poignant piece from the author Angela Garbus.
--:-- Jen Gann: And in this piece that she wrote for the Cut series, Angela turns to her husband, who's a labor organizer, and she says, sort of jokingly, can mothers unionize? It's a line that I just can't get out of my head. Like, could women get together and organize around our demands? I wish that someone else would unionize for us because organizing is a lot of work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That a whole other form of labor right there. Anyone hear that the women are tired?
--:-- Jen Gann: But still, something's got to give, right? I mean, that is the point of Angela's piece. She says without adequate family leave and child care and, you know, the basic systems in place to make it possible for women to juggle everything, women are constantly fighting this uphill battle. And it's not just exhausting, but she questions, is it really worth it? Why this drive to constantly work harder, achieve more, be more successful?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm very tired, to be frank. Yeah. I'm very tired after this year.
--:-- Jen Gann: It's clearer than ever that any kind of promises that were made to our generation of women are not happening. And so I would hope that individually they're kind of rethinking their relationships to work as much as is possible because even being able to have that kind of thought is a privilege. You know, we have jobs that we can rethink our relationships to.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jen Gann from New York Magazine's The Cut. Thank you so much for being here. And I wish for you a great nap. I wish for you some awesome sleep, some consecutive hours and some meaningful rest. Yes, a nap for all the women. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This week, we're collecting stories from you and all of our listeners about what you're never going to see the same again after the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And hearing that interview with Jen Gann made me think about this one story we got from Madison in Illinois.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One thing that I will never look at the same after this pandemic is parental leave.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We welcomed our first baby at the beginning of the pandemic. The plan was for me to have six weeks off of paid leave, and my boyfriend would have taken two unpaid weeks off from work. But shortly after I gave birth, we had stay-at-home orders, and we found ourselves together in our home, just the three of us, for several months.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It was the most challenging, tiresome, yet absolutely the most beautiful moments of our lives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It really just makes me reevaluate the parental leave process and what parents went through in the past and what they'll continue to go through in the future, not being able to spend those first precious moments as a family.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Tomorrow, we'll hear Duarte's interview with Helen Branswell from STAP.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She's been reporting on epidemics for years now, from Toronto's SARS outbreak in 2003 to Ebola, Zika, and now the coronavirus pandemic. And she says timing is everything.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I spent a lot of February of 2020 really puzzled by how slowly everybody seemed to be moving and how people were trying to act like everything was normal almost.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
