--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers. Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see. They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue. We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramaswaram. The U.S. has faced tough economic times before COVID-19. We've had wars, stock market crashes, housing bubbles burst. Usually, when these tough times come, men are the ones who suffer job losses the most. But this time around... Coronavirus caused this recession that has hit women especially hard, and now it even carries its own name. She-cession.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Studies show that when 1.1 million people lost their jobs in September, 80% were women. It cannot be understated just how much women have been impacted by COVID-19 and the economic downturn. Bridget Schulte is director of the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. She writes about women and work and told me why 2020 is different.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Usually in recessions, typically men tend to be affected because the industries that are most affected in recessions are things like construction, manufacturing, trade and transportation. Well, that's completely different in this pandemic. Women are affected really largely in two ways. The first way is that they are overrepresented or disproportionately represented in the industry sectors that are also most impacted by the pandemic.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: You know, the restaurants that have had to shut down, the schools and the child care centers that have had to close. They are overrepresented in industries that have just been decimated here. We're thinking hotels and spas and salons, clothing stores. It's just a real challenge.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: The second thing that really has impacted women is that there is a large segment of the workforce that rely on schools and childcare in order to be able to work. When schools shut down and daycares closed, many women felt they had no choice but returned to jobs as homemakers.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: I think we have to take a step back and recognize that when you look at census data, the majority of children in the United States are being raised in families where all parents work. So that means that they're either in dual income families where both parents are working or they're in single parent families. So families have really borne the brunt of trying to figure out how to combine work, try to keep doing their work and take care and educate their children.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So even though sort of everybody's doing more, women are disproportionately doing more. They were picking up far more of the homeschooling, far more of the child care. And the consequences are huge and potentially long term and far reaching.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And I assume this isn't impacting all women the same way. If you're wealthier, you'll probably have an easier time weathering the storm. I think that there is no doubt. And we all need to be incredibly aware of this, that the women who are most impacted are not only women of color, but women of lesser means.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: There are 15 million single mothers in this country who have been most severely affected by the pandemic. Women of color have been far more disproportionately impacted, again, because they tend to be overrepresented in the retail, hourly, hospitality kinds of fields.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: The stress of motherhood, the stress of being a working mom, the stress of growing a business, the stress of being a Black woman in America, these are all the things that I've had to strap on my back. It's sort of the perfect storm that can set women back decades.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: They have to go to work. They have no protections to kind of give them a little bit more cushion. And they also have kids. And there really has not been an appropriate response that recognizes that and that does anything to really mitigate it.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: I think the short-term impacts of so many women being forced to leave their jobs might be easy to guess. I mean, the social and emotional challenges of losing your job are really well documented. But what could the long-term impacts of women exiting the workforce be? Well, so many.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So think about that. The Century Foundation came out with a report that said that it could cost women $64 billion in earnings. So there have been other studies that show that with every sort of break from the workforce, women's wages drop.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: You know, that one-year break, often for childcare reasons, you can lose as much as a third of your lifetime earnings. But if you're out for several years, I mean, that more than doubles. You know, so we don't know will women be hired back. And kind of throughout the socioeconomic spectrum will women be able to go back in at the same level?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: But there is no doubt that there are potential long-term earnings losses, potential long-term promotion, advancement, stability losses. What does this mean for the companies or institutions we work at? I mean, more and more women have ascended to leadership positions in the last few decades.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Is this mass exodus from the workforce going to disrupt that progress? If you just look at the statistics and people don't seem to recognize this. Let's hear it for the women. We are now dominating every level of higher education. Women have earned more than 50 percent of the college degrees for 30 years.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So it's actually men who have been an underrepresented minority in higher education now for almost 40 years. And yet you look at every industry, every sector, there's a huge leadership gap that men, typically white men, still are in pretty much every position of power.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Everywhere, from politics to academics to media to everything. As we know, the Fortune 500 companies have no black women as CEOs. And one of the things that I've heard over the years is, oh, there isn't a pipeline. I don't understand what that means because in my community, I see a plethora of highly educated African-Americans who are ambitious, who are zealous, who are want to make a difference.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So, you know, this is another cost. So the fact that we have lost and may lose a lot of that firepower, brainpower, talent, skill on all levels, it will be another delay in trying to really bring equity and kind of a broader perspective to leadership and decision making.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: I think you cannot underestimate the really devastating and long-term impacts that we'll have. It means continued leadership by one single life experience from one single demographic, a white man.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Speaking of the menfolk, how has the pandemic impacted their lives at home and with their families? Men are doing more than they did before the pandemic. So many more men are actually, you know, at home. They are seeing how much work it takes to run a household.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): So our data was collected before COVID and they were not. They were not doing an equal amount of work. Research shows there is still inequality at home with women taking on most household responsibilities. One study estimates it will be, listen to this, another 75 years before men do half the unpaid work at home.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): But what is interesting is what our data showed that once men have that experience of care, that's what changes them. That's what changes and shapes their attitudes. It transforms them and transforms their lives.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): You know, the other thing to think about is 75% of all health workers are women. They are out on the front lines and their husbands and partners have had to pick up at home. So I think that that could be a foundational change for men, that finally having that experience could lead to maybe social changes long and slow.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): So are you feeling optimistic about our post-COVID, post-vaccine future? So the pandemic has completely changed the narrative in a potentially important way, because all of a sudden people are seeing that keys to a healthy economy, keys to productive and stable businesses, childcare is central to that.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): So when you think long term, once there is a vaccine, once we go back to some kind of new normal, most women who have been forced out of the workplace will have to go back to work. So now I think we understand just how difficult we've made it for families in this country.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): And when we look at our, you know, other competitive economies, other advanced economies, we are such outliers. I think that is much clearer now than it ever has been before.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Coming up, it wasn't always this hard for working families. Brigid tells us how we got to where we are today. Thank you.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): So much more. Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained. That's chime.com slash explained. Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Are you happy with your job? Like really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place. And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. That's strawberry.me slash unstuck.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Bridget, it seems like so much of this economic crisis is because of a child care crisis. Have we ever seen the U.S. attempt to offer child care to working women?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Yes. To fight this war, 10 million more people must go to work by the end of 1943. During the Second World War, when so many men were off fighting in Europe and in the Pacific, there was an enormous war effort here in the United States.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: You know, we needed to build tanks and ships and ammunition. With every man utilized, we are still short millions of hands. We must call upon women. Women were working in shipyards. They were welding the airplanes. Rosie the Riveter, right?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men. Some jobs better.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Well, there were cries for, well, what about the children? You know, who's going to take care of the children? So there was a story that came out in a newspaper of a child who was left in a car in a parking lot, a shipyard, because the mother had to go to work and had no other option.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And there was so much outrage. There was a recognition that this was a systemic and structural problem. When married women with small children have to take jobs, everything possible will be done to provide daycare for the children.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so interestingly, there was not a child care act that was passed. There was not, you know, anything like that. It came through like a military construction budget. You know, it was an infrastructure expense.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And they built a series of what they called Lanham Centers, very close to shipyards, to, you know, ammunition factories, to where women were working. 27% of Richmond shipbuilders were women.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Feminine workers with small children inspired the founding of 35 nursery school units and 10 extended daycare centers, which mothered over 1,400 youngsters at a time.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Okay, so how did these Lanham centers work? On their way to work, parents left their hopefuls at one of the nursery schools, knowing that the daily routine, commencing with a physical checkup and followed by organized play, would make their children both healthy and happy.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: You know, when I was reading about them, I actually wanted to cry because it was high quality, affordable, on a sliding scale depending upon what you could pay, accessible, easy to get into.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: The 50-cent daily fee included mid-morning and afternoon nourishment, as well as a hot, balanced lunch. They understood the pressures of trying to work and care for your family.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so sometimes you would go pick your child up and they'd send you home with like a roast chicken and a nice warm meal. That was part of the plan.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So there was a real understanding that providing high quality, accessible, affordable child care was key to the economy, was key to the war effort.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so they did make it work. We have learned as industry that it can be done as a part of an employee service. So don't tell me we can't do it because we've done it before. We know how to do it.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So why didn't it stick? Why don't we have Lanham Centers anymore?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Attention, the peoples of the world. World War II is about to come to its official closing. So all of a sudden you had all of these GIs coming home, and they needed to go back to work.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so what the government decided is to help the GIs go back to work. They needed to get women out of the workforce to make room for these returning GIs.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: The family was solidly founded on the father as patriarch and breadwinner, and on the mother as cook, housekeeper, and nurse of the children.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so they played these newsreels. It was called Modern Woman, the Lost Sex. One of the trends of modern life, which has been cited as most disruptive of marriage, is the increasing economic independence of women.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: There's like this, the voice of, you know, God. That man was meant to work and women were meant to stay home and care for the family. Everywhere, children of working parents are being left without adequate supervision or restraint.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And that somehow if women worked, they had pictures of little kids playing in the street and smoking. That it was just going to be pandemonium. It was going to be terrible. It was going to be the breakdown of society. Catastrophic social forces have propelled American women away from femininity and into careers at terrific cost to themselves and society.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So there was a very orchestrated effort to get women out of the workforce, you know, a huge cultural effort but also backed by the U government.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So once you wanted women out, you didn't need to keep funding child care. So those centers all closed.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: However, many women stayed in the workforce after the Second World War. They didn't all go home. The Ozzie and Harriet ideal, quote unquote, it was only for a portion of American families, most of them white, most of them, you know, middle and upper middle class.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: But women continue to work. I guess I'm not surprised that on the policy level, the U.S. kind of stopped prioritizing this as they chased this 1950s fantasy.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: But what about later when there's this very loud sexual revolution and women start asking for equal pay and pushing for paid family leave?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Much has been accomplished over the past 10 years. We have led the fight for comparable words. Kind of again, late 60s, early 70s, it was a real moment around the world, you know, that there really had been this very powerful women's movement.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: We have led in the struggle for quality child care in this country. And in the late 60s and early 70s, it's fascinating. There was this sort of moment and Republicans and Democrats alike were recognizing, yeah, that's actually a good idea.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And there was a bipartisan movement in Congress to pass universal, easily accessible, quality, affordable child care. So it passes both houses of Congress.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Well then, so fascinating, Pat Buchanan was working in the Nixon White House at the time, and he was part of this growing kind of far-right movement.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so Pat Buchanan had just come back from a trip to the Soviet Union. And he was totally freaked out by, you know, all the young pioneers all dressed alike and, you know, all the young kids kind of marching in lockstep and spouting Leninist doctrine.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And he equated child care with that system that he saw. And he was totally freaked out. And he came back and he convinced Richard Nixon to veto the bill.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: President Nixon has broken his own promise to support child development, and he has greatly damaged the chances for the children of working families as well as poor children.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Mr. Nixon says, and I quote from his veto statement, no immediate need has been demonstrated, unquote, for these centers.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: I went to interview Pat Buchanan for my book, and one of the things that he said that struck me, he just said, we not only wanted to kill the bill, the child care bill. We wanted to kill the very idea of child care in the United States because mothers should be home with cake and pie at three when their children come home from school.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So what's shocking to me is that Pat Buchanan, he did, he won because we didn't talk about child care. We haven't talked about child care in a substantive way until now, until the pandemic.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And what signs do you see that the federal or local government might actually take this on now?
--:-- Bridget Schulte: So it is a big ask. It's a big investment. It's a big challenge. And nobody was really talking about it seriously until Elizabeth Warren started to talk about it during the Democratic primaries.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: I have a two-cent wealth tax so that we can cover child care for all of our children and provide universal pre-K for every three-year-old and four-year-old in America.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And we can also make high-quality child care affordable and accessible. President-elect Joe Biden has a fairly substantial care plan. It's not just child care, but, you know, after-school care, elder care.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: Think of expanded vital services like rides to appointments, meals, day programs for seniors. The whole care economy has come into much sharper focus.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And so I will say that there are hopeful signs for really supporting families. And finally, trying to bring the United States more in line with other competitive economies, because it's just been cruel and punishing here.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: And we need to wake up and do something about it. But, you know, it's all about power and what you can get through Congress. And Congress hasn't been able to get another desperately needed bailout package in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis.
--:-- Bridget Schulte: If it's a divided Congress and a Biden administration, I don't know in the short term how successful they'll be in moving forward on the care plan and the care economy. We'll just have to see.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Bridget Schulte is a journalist and author of the book Overwhelmed Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. She's also director of the Better Life Lab at New America.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramaswaram. The rest of us who make the show will be here too.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Our producers are Amina El-Sadi, Will Reed, Mujizadi and Noam Hassenfeld, who also contributes music.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Extra production help this week came from Bird Pinkerton. Cecilia Lay helped too while also keeping us factual.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Breakmaster Cylinder makes our music and keeps us sounding fresh.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Our engineer, Afim Shapiro, keeps us sounding smooth.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): And our supervising producer, Golda Arthur, keeps us in line.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts and Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Host (Halima Shah): Thanks for listening.
