How women became America's safety net

Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.

In the new book "Holding it Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net," sociologist Jessica Calarco says it’s time that changed.

Today, On Point: How women became America's safety net.

Jessica Calarco, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her new book is "Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net."

Becky Logue-Conroy, research analyst with the Center for Women in Work, which is in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers.

Angelique Espinoza, director of policy at Good Business Colorado.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. And here's today's thesis. The United States lags far behind in the robustness of its social safety net in comparison to peer nations. That's a fact. Okay that part is fact, not thesis necessarily. So let me rephrase. The thesis for today is that part of the reason why that remains true is this nation's reliance on women to hold together the tattered parts of America's social safety net.

For example, Kristen in Denver, Colorado.

KRISTEN: Five years ago, after my mom unexpectedly passed away, quickly after my dad passed away, I found myself in a position where I decided to take on the care of my 47-year-old brother with Down syndrome, which I did knowing the struggles. I happen to be a behavior analyst.

And so this is my field, working with people with special needs. It's been a struggle. It's been lonely. A lot of times, I can't make plans, because I don't have somebody to watch him or really the money to pay somebody to watch him.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Bonnie in Lakeville, Minnesota.

BONNIE: I quit 18 years ago my job that wasn't making as much as my husband's to take care of our disabled son.

And in the process, reinvented the wheel by doing home daycare for about ten years. At 10 year point, my parents got sick. I was part of the sandwich community taking care of my parents. Taking care of my, turned out to be, three differently abled children. All on IEPs. Managing my elderly parents with zero help from my siblings. And in home daycare.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Caroline from just outside Washington, D.C.

CAROLINE: A year ago, my husband had an aortic dissection and became paralyzed, almost died and became paralyzed below the waist. Home care is too expensive. It's like the price of a nanny. So I have to work full time to run our family. We, my in laws, help a little bit, but not that much. My neighbors have been great in terms of casseroles and yard work.

But yes, I feel very much like I'm holding these things together alone, and it's very hard.

CHAKRABARTI: Three On Point listeners there with their stories about how, in their experience, the U.S. does not have an adequate social safety net. Instead, it has women. Jessica Calarco knows a lot about this. She spent years researching it.

She's an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And her new book is titled, "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net." Professor Calarco, welcome to On Point.

JESSICA CALARCO: Thank you so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So I'd like to have you add another story to the three that we just heard, because your book is full of them.

And can you just walk me through one of the first ones in your book? That of a woman who you call in the book Akari.

CALARCO: Sure, so Akari's story is one of the most tragic ones in the book, unfortunately, and so I'll preface the story with that. I think it's, so Akari was, when I first met her, a relatively typical stay at home mom, typical in the sense that she was pushed into doing that work for her family, because she got caught in child care's missing middle.

Her family earned a little bit too much money to qualify for the kind of limited government support that we do provide for child care for families, but certainly not enough, around $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year, too much to qualify for support, but not enough to pay $2,000, $3,000 a month for care for her two young children.

And so she made less money than her partner. And so she stepped back out of the workforce. And then things were going okay until relatively early in the COVID-19 pandemic when unfortunately, her fiancé passed away suddenly and tragically. And left her scrambling, those first couple of months after his death were just a blur of grief and government forms for Akari, and she was scrambling to make ends meet.

She ended up moving herself and her two young children into a shelter, because that was the best option that they had to keep a roof over their heads, with no savings and no life insurance, like many Americans. And at the same time, she had to rely on welfare, which meant also trying to find a paid job. Because we have work requirements for welfare in this country.

And so she's in the midst of the pandemic in the fall of 2020, scrambling to find paid work when other people are getting laid off, just to be able to qualify, for the maximum she could get was $288 a month in benefits in Indiana, where she was living. And this was maybe not surprisingly, not enough. And so even with a paid job, she found a part time job in retail.

It wasn't enough to make ends meet. And so she added a second part time job and then a third job. She was working her third part time job working a weekend shift at a manufacturing facility. But to make that work she had to rely on her fiancé's sister to watch the kids over the weekend and so she would drop them off on Friday nights and pick them up on Monday mornings. Because it didn't make sense to try to do all the back and forth and disrupt everyone's sleep schedules, given the hours that she was working.

She talked about how for her daughter, her oldest, who was in preschool at the time, she said it felt like she lost both parents. That she lost not only her dad, but also her mom, because she never got to see her anymore. And this was deeply tragic for Akari. But it was also, she talked about how she would be better off financially going back on welfare, because that third job had pushed her over the benefits cliff for many of the kinds of services that she'd qualified for before.

But she also knew there were time limits on these programs, and that she had limits on the amount of money that she could save up if she was still on welfare. And how she hoped that maybe someday she'd be able to work her way up to getting the kind of job that would actually be able to support her family long term.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. There's so many aspects of Akari's story that point to different places where the U.S. 's social safety net is either frayed or gone. But I'd like you, Professor Calarco, to give us sort of your perspective, your definition of what the safety net is, because it can mean different things to different people.

So in providing that definition, can you also then point to what parts of the safety net Akari's story really highlights as being very threadbare?

CALARCO: Sure. So essentially, social safety nets, the way that I'm talking about them in this book, are designed to protect people from falling into poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and also ensure that people have time and energy to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care.

And many other countries around the world provide that kind of support, or at least some level of support, along those lines by using high taxes on corporations and wealthy people, especially, and also regulations and policies that help to ensure that people have access to those kinds of supports.

And in the U.S., we've instead tried to DIY society. We've kept our taxes low. We've slashed huge holes in the meager safety net that we do have. And we've made those kinds of programs, when they are available, we've made them punitive. In the sense that we saw with Akari, how she had to engage in paid work to be able to qualify for welfare benefits.

She had to move her family into a women's shelter to be able to get onto the top of the wait list for affordable housing, and for the other kinds of programs that she needed to be able to make ends meet for her family. And certainly, we see also how she didn't have access, even before the pandemic, even before her partner passed away, to affordable child care, which many other families and many other communities around the world take for granted.

And that was what ultimately pushed her into being a stay at home mom and to not having the kind of paid job that might have made it easier to make ends meet, and to make that transition after her partner passed away.

CHAKRABARTI: So to put a specific set of names to the description of a healthy social safety net that you just provided, professor, we're talking about things like, it seems so obvious to state, but I want to state them clearly.

Housing, income, child care, elder care, food, secure retirement, things like that.

CALARCO: Absolutely. And in addition to that, programs like Universal Paid Family Leave and Universal Paid Retirement and Universal Paid Sick Leave, all of which help people to take care of themselves and take care of the people around them, as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So really the key thing that we want to explore today, that Akari's story, and the three that we heard from our own listeners earlier, the thesis that in the absence of robust programs, robust government programs, in all of these areas, people still have to try to survive.

And you argue that the bulk of that effort falls on women. So walk me through the evidence of why you say that.

CALARCO: Sure. So essentially, as I mentioned before, we try to DIY society. In the U.S., we try not to invest in these kinds of social safety net programs. But the problem there is that this DIY model doesn't actually work.

Forcing people to manage all of that risk on their own has left many families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse, certainly like Akari's family, she had limited resources that she could rely on in her community, in her family, in her own life. And yet we haven't collapsed, because women are finding ways to hold it together, filling in the gaps in our economy, and also the gaps in our threadbare safety net.

Women, for example, are disproportionately the default caregivers for children, for the sick, for the elderly, for the destitute. And they're also the ones who disproportionately fill the lowest paid and the underpaid jobs in our economy, jobs that are often too labor intensive to be highly profitable jobs like child care and customer service and home health care.

And as I show in the book, this kind of unpaid and underpaid labor that is very expensive. Overwhelmingly done by women helps, to maintain this illusion of a DIY society and make it seem as though we can get by without the kind of net that we really need.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We've done many shows about how women are scrambling to fill the gaps here.

And my question is, why do you think that is? The evidence, as also you provide in the book, is pretty overwhelming that this is the case. But in talking to all these women and doing the research that you did, professor, do you have a sense as to why? I don't want to just accept as default that women are going to do this.

There has to be a reason why we're expecting them, and not necessarily men, to help hold things together.

CALARCO: In the book, I talk about how we've engineered it this way, in the sense that I trace the history of both our DIY society as a whole, and the kind of decisions that we've made to treat women as our sort of reserve force, as people who can be plugged into different parts of the economy or different parts of the social safety net.

I talk in the book, for example, about the story of what happened during and after World War II, where during the war, we realized that we needed as many women in the workforce as possible to keep the economy going, while many men were off fighting in battle. And so that meant mothers of young children joining the workforce.

At the time, only about 1 in 30 mothers of young kids in the U.S. were working for pay. And so to that work, we had to, we use funds from the defense spending on child care or use from the Lanham Act to fund child care centers to make it possible for women to work for pay. And that became a way to get them into the workforce.

But we took those away as soon as the war ended and pushed women back out again. And so this laid the groundwork for where we are today.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're talking about how women, essentially, are the social safety net in the United States. For example, here's On Point listener Christine. She told us she worked in her home and at times outside the home, cared for her two kids, and has cared for her parents at the end of their lives, all while deferring to her husband's demanding career.

CHRISTINE: At one point in time, I just couldn't carry that load. So I quit my job. And so I went for years without being employed outside of the home, only taking on part time jobs and full time motherhood, and taking care of my parents. Now, I'm 65 and divorced and to think that my ex-husband gets full Social Security and I get only half of his.

It's really upsetting. I worked as hard as he did. And that law needs to be changed. Women should get the same amount that their husbands get. Or if they're working in the home, there should be Social Security allotment for working mothers.

CHAKRABARTI: We're joined today by Jessica Calarco. She's an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her new book is "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net."

Now, Professor Calarco, you had talked about, briefly, about the Second World War and this short term experiment that the country had in a more robust safety net, particularly regarding child care. I'd love to actually explore that in more detail with you. And so in the book, you write about Mobile, Alabama, in particular, and how the regional director of emergency management there had asked, or had written a letter to the War Manpower Commission in, what, 1942, saying, We need women, we need to recruit women to build ships. Because the shipbuilders that they used to hire were off fighting the Second World War.

So can you tell me a little bit about that story in particular?

CALARCO: Sure. So essentially what happened during the war was that we had all these men off, fighting overseas and we needed to keep the economy running at home and we also needed to fuel a massive defense production effort. And so in places like Mobile, Alabama, which was a major shipbuilding facility, we needed as many women in the workforce as possible.

And they started off with propaganda campaigns. That was the first tool that they used to try to persuade women to join the workforce. But this maybe didn't work. Maybe not surprisingly, because many of the women who were still at home had young children and needed to care for them.

And there weren't child care options, even to the extent that there are today. And so for many of these women, it took, this wasn't possible. And I think I mentioned before that there were about one in 30 moms of young kids were in the workforce at the time. And so eventually and with some sort of hand wringing and some foot dragging, the War Manpower Commission and Congress eventually decides that they're going to use funding from the Lanham Act to set up child care centers in key defense production centers around the country. And those centers offered high quality child care, oftentimes 10 or 12 or more hours per day in communities that needed it during the war and helped to provide this high quality care for kids, including aftercare and summer care for school age children in many places.

And this helped to raise the workforce participation rate among moms of young kids from 1 in 30 to 1 in 6.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here because I would actually like to add some specific details that you provide in the book, because I'm really trying to drive to what is different about the United States.

Okay? And you've done such a good job with this particular period of American history. So first of all, going back to that Mobile, Alabama example, as you write in the book, holding it together, that the regional director of emergency management was this guy named Burton Morley, right? And at first, his presumption about why it was hard to recruit women to work in the shipyards was that they wouldn't be willing to take, quote-unquote, masculine jobs.

So there was that. That was an interesting supposition from the beginning here. And so he puts out an ad campaign, like you say, where trying to apply sort of propagandistic pressure to women to come into work. Because there was a flyer that you found that read, if Hitler came to mobile, every woman would defend her home with a gun, a knife, or her bare fingers.

But if Hitler and his hordes will not come, oh, Hitler and his hordes will not come if women help to build ships. Can you just, first of all, as a sociologist, can you tell me what you make of that? That the first presumption, now granted, this is the '40s, but the first presumption was that women just didn't want to work in quote-unquote masculine jobs.

And that was the thing keeping out them out of the labor force.

Looks like we just lost the connection to Professor Calarco, so we'll try to get it back. But what our plan was in a couple of minutes, but we'll just advance that plan right now, to go to a couple of states, U.S. states, which have actually taken steps forward beyond what the federal government provides, to shore up that social safety net a little bit, so that women don't have to hold everything together.

So let's go to New Jersey where Becky Logue-Conroy joins us. She's a research analyst with the Center for Women in Work in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. Becky Logue-Conroy, welcome to On Point.

BECKY LOGUE-CONROY: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: It's great to have you. Okay, so we're just mixing up our plan here a little, but it's live radio and that's how it works.

LOGUE-CONROY: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: We wanted to go get down to the state level, because to us, it seemed that there's been a lot more progress or at least dynamic thinking about how to help families and women in various states. New Jersey was a great example. Because I think, if I recall correctly, a couple of key things or programs were started, what, back in 2009 in Jersey?

LOGUE-CONROY: Yes. In 2009, New Jersey passed their paid family leave law.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me, yeah, go ahead, tell me more.

LOGUE-CONROY: Sure, after California passed their paid leave law in 2002, those who were at the Center for Women and Work at that time and some advocates formed the Time to Care Coalition to push for paid leave legislation in New Jersey.

And that legislation was passed in 2008 and the benefits actually started paying out in 2009. And in that initial legislation, it allowed for 6 weeks of leave at 2/3 of a person's average weekly wage. But since then, the legislation was updated in 2019 with changes that expanded the definition of family to anyone an employee considers family.

So that's a really huge change, because now people can take leave in New Jersey to care for anyone they consider a family. It extended the number of weeks to 12. And increased the wage replacement to 85% of the average weekly wage. And then finally in 2019, part of that legislation was to allow the department of labor to do some more training and public service campaigns to help workers to understand their benefits and to hopefully increase the uptake.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This was, it was officially passed in 2008, enacted in 2009. I don't know if, but how, what were the arguments, if any, against it at the time that the Center for Women in Work faced?

Maybe there weren't many, because it got passed.

LOGUE-CONROY: It did get passed. It was first initially proposed as a law in 2006, so it did take a little bit of time for it to get passed. I do think some of the arguments were probably similar to the arguments you hear today, when people hear from, about national legislation is that perhaps it would be difficult for businesses to lose workers for that period of time.

Those types of things, where it might be hard to replace a worker if workers were given that amount of leave. Workers actually pay into the system through their paycheck, and so it has no burden on the employer in terms of cost of the program. But I think some of the arguments were that businesses might not be able to replace a person who is taking leave for that length of time.

CHAKRABARTI: Understood. Okay. So this is really important. So let's take the cost factor first. This paid leave is supported by the state through the Temporary Disability Insurance Program in New Jersey?

LOGUE-CONROY: The Temporary Disability Insurance Program is for one's own care, and then the Family Leave Insurance Program was built upon that temporary disability program, but family leave insurance is to care for others.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

LOGUE-CONROY: And so New Jersey has those two programs that are built upon each other. The TDI is to care for oneself. FLI, family of insurance, is to care for others.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And when you say that workers pay into it, it's an actual sort of, it comes like social security, or something comes out of their wages a little bit.

LOGUE-CONROY: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah. Okay. And how so in that case, are you saying that it doesn't actually cost businesses anything? That 85% wage replacement that you're talking about, is that entirely coming from the state program?

LOGUE-CONROY: For the family leave insurance. Yes. Temporary disability insurance is a little bit different.

Both contribute, both employers and employees, but that has, TDI has a longer history. But when FLI, the family leave insurance, so this would be leave taken for bonding with a new baby, caring for a sick family member, those kinds of things. That is fully employee funded. And so that, employees pay into the system, it builds up a fund, like an insurance fund, and when people take their family leave, their pay comes from that fund.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Has it, I don't know if, but has it ever come close to the funds being, that fund being exhausted?

LOGUE-CONROY: The fund changes each year, the payment into it changes each year to try to account for that.

CHAKRABARTI: So the answer is no so far?

LOGUE-CONROY: So far.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, good. Who's taking the leave as supported by the state?

LOGUE-CONROY: Yeah. So it's mostly women still. Even though this leave insurance program is gender neutral, anyone can take it. 70% of the people who take leave to care for a family member ,70% of those who take it are women. So still women are shouldering that care burden like Dr. Calarco spoke about, but at least they're getting paid for some of it.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you find that there are still groups of women who, even though this is available for them in New Jersey, are hesitant to take it?

LOGUE-CONROY: Yes. So New Jersey's family leave insurance program does not include job protections. Job protections are located in a different law called the Family Leave Act.

And so those two names are very similar. So people do get them confused and sometimes people don't know whether their job is protected or not. So while most workers in New Jersey qualify for that wage replacement, there are some limitations when it comes to job protection.

So the job protection you have to work at the same employer for at least a year, you have to have worked for at least 1,000 hours And you have to work at employer with at least 30 employees. And so those people who fall under those who do not qualify for job protection are more likely to be women, are more likely to be the lowest paid workers, and are more likely to work in those types of jobs that Dr. Calarco spoke about earlier, food preparation, social services, personal care occupations, like child care workers, personal care aids and others.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Is there a move now or a desire to include job protection in this leave program?

LOGUE-CONROY: Yeah, so that is what people are currently working toward. Some of the advocates are working toward that. There was a bill introduced in January to reduce the number of employees to 10 or to 5, depending on who was supporting the bill.

But there still is the issue of working at the same employer for at least a year and working for at least 1,000 hours. Many states that have passed paid leave after New Jersey actually have no waiting period after, or it's a very short waiting period and includes employers of all sizes.

And so that's something that still is a shortfall in New Jersey.

CHAKRABARTI: Given that we don't even have anything like New Jersey has now at the federal level, Becky, what do you think, what lesson do you think New Jersey has for the possibility of any kind of federal legislation for this little patch of the social safety net.

LOGUE-CONROY: Sure. New Jersey, like many states, has been an incubator for the types of programs that may help to support families. So often states end up being the kinds of places where you can test these programs, and see how people use them, that potentially could be moved into a federal program later. And I think what we have learned in New Jersey, given the changes that were made in 2019 and in 2020. Are that the original six weeks and two thirds of pay was just not enough for people to feel like they could budget for that kind of leave, or for the length of leave where they would need to take, whereas now at 85% wage replacements, you could potentially budget for that. Though some states also, for the lowest wage workers, cover 100% of pay because those workers have the hardest time taking long leaves.

But the other lesson is that sometimes people don't have family members that fit a box, right? So New Jersey's decision to include any, the inclusive definition of family. Really has been a big deal, because as long as a medical provider, certifies that someone considers you family, you're able to take that leave to care for them, which makes a big difference in people's lives who may not have family members close, but may be very close to a neighbor, or may be very close to a friend and consider that person family.

And that's one of the best parts about the New Jersey law.

CHAKRABARTI: Becky Logue-Conroy, Research Analyst with the Center for Women in Work at the School of Management and Labor at Labor Relations at Rutgers University, thank you so much for joining us today.

LOGUE-CONROY: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So Jessica Calarco, I think we have you back here, is that correct?

CALARCO: Yes. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Sorry about that dropout there. I think you were able to hear quite a bit of what Becky was talking about regarding New Jersey's leave program. Just your quick thoughts on what they've managed to do there since 2009.

CALARCO: And these kinds of programs are a bellwether of the kind of positive change that is possible if we fight for a stronger social safety net. There's still a long way to go, as Becky was saying, with many of these programs, that there are still gaps that they leave, particularly for the women who are most vulnerable in our economy.

And so I think even in those places, there are things that we can do. But I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that these kinds of programs are not being rolled out equally across the country. And if anything, we're seeing a growing inequality across different parts of the U.S., across different states, in terms of the idea that the places that are enacting paid family leave are also the places where they're doing more to protect women's reproductive freedom and reproductive freedom more generally.

They're doing more to build stronger social safety nets with Medicaid and with food security and with affordable housing in ways that other states are going in the opposite direction. And so I think as much as these are great programs, we also have to worry about who's getting left behind in the process, too.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're exploring what to do about the fact that women are holding together the frayed and tattered social safety net in this country. Here's a couple of more examples from On Point listeners. This is Karen from Maidens, Virginia. She tells us that she eventually had to quit her job in order to take care of her dying husband.

KAREN: I tried to do daycare. Daycare was eight hours a day. My job was not an eight hour a day job. I did it for several months, getting about two hours of sleep at night and trying to do everything, just about broke me. Now that my husband's gone, I'm left trying to pick up the pieces and try to get my life back in order.

This is a year out of my life that I wouldn't have traded for the world to be able to take care of him. However, it sure would have been so much nicer and easier if I was able to get some help.

CHAKRABARTI: Here's Diana from Seattle, Washington, who is caring for a loved one and says it's almost unbearable, the daily struggle to hold it all together.

DIANA: I feel like I've lost everything that ever meant anything to me, and sometimes I feel like screaming to my family and friends who are so nice to me, but can they see that I am falling apart and disappearing? I don't know that they can see that it is such a lonely road. Even when you find others in community online and stuff, it's lonely and it's expensive.

I'll never recoup what I've lost during this time and there's no end in sight.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Diana in Seattle, Washington. Professor Calarco, let's just take a minute to do some comparison here. And again, none of this is going to come as a terrible shock to people, but it's important to highlight it.

Those are some stories from American women. You have more, that you have in the book, because you spoke to many people. What if those women lived elsewhere, if they lived in some European countries, what would they get instead?

CALARCO: Sure. I think in that sense, it's important to note that it's not perfect elsewhere, but at the same time, the kinds of social safety nets that other countries have in place, things like paid sick leave, paid vacation time, guaranteed paid family leave, universal child care and preschool, child allowances for families with young children, that give them flexibility around whether to work for pay or whether to stay home, universal free lunches for school kids and free college tuition and universal health care, things like guaranteed elder care and guaranteed retirement pensions that are available to all of those, regardless of whether they've done unpaid care work or paid work in the economy.

Those kinds of programs are things that other countries have put in place to help people manage risk in ways that we force families and communities to figure out those risks on their own.

CHAKRABARTI: So here's the thing that I keep coming back to every time we have a conversation about women and the U.S. social safety net. I've said it a million times on, not this hour in particular, but in all this like whole body of shows that the U.S. is this outlier amongst developed nations. The question is, why is that persistent?

Okay. Because what I'm wondering is back to your example of this like short period of time, this three- or four-year period of time where the U.S. government provided child care so that women could work, in wartime America, but then at the end of that program was dissolved. Versus in European countries around that same time, not all, but some of them, an entirely different path was taken, which actually, when you think about it, is even more remarkable. Because some of those countries had been utterly bankrupted and destroyed by the Second World War.

Can you tell me why you think that divergence happened then?

CALARCO: I think there's two things going on here. First, is that many European countries needed women to stay in the workforce to rebuild, given the kind of destruction that happened in their economies and in their physical societies. But the other piece here is that we had laid the groundwork for this DIY society for decades.

Even before World War II in the 1930s, I talk about in the book how in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a group of kind of elite business executives, part of the National Association of Manufacturers, were looking for ways to push back against this kind of broad social safety net programming.

And what they found was neoliberalism, which is an economic theory that was being developed at the time by a group of Austrian economists who posited that societies don't actually need social safety nets. Because if people don't have that kind of protection, they'll make better choices and keep themselves safe in the process.

And research has subsequently debunked this theory, but at the time, it was a popular idea. And so they paid to install these economists at elite universities in the U.S. where they went on to train the next generation of economists and business leaders, people like Milton Friedman, who then became the architects of this kind of modern social system that we have, this DIY society.

And of course, that raises the question, but why women? And the answer there is that women, once we push people into caregiving responsibilities, it becomes much easier to exploit them. Once they have to care, once they have to manage risks, not only for themselves, but for someone else. Then it becomes very easy, as we saw with Akari, to push them into low wage jobs or to push them out of the workforce entirely to fill those kinds of gaps.

And because of our gendered norms in the context of World War II, Congress dragged its feet on building child care centers, because they didn't believe that women belonged in the workforce, especially if they had young children at home. And those kinds of beliefs still persist today. Those kinds of myths, as I talk about in the book, the myth of Mars and Venus, this idea that women are just happier at home, that men are better suited for care work.

Those ideas persist and certainly the idea that kids are better off with moms at home. That's a really sticky one that helps to perpetuate this idea that women should be doing this work and makes it easier to exploit them in the process.

CHAKRABARTI: So here's what I want to drive at. I wonder if people are going to get mad when I say this, I wonder if we just need to accept that is true.

What the United States is and that we're not Europe and then the mindset of what constitutes a healthy society is just different here in America. And you could, you point to the size of the economy, the GDP, et cetera, and saying we're still like, this giant economy that has great influence all over the world.

People want to come to the U.S. So obviously the good outweighs the bad, like it just is what it is, and we should stop complaining. And here's why I raised that, because we got this call, for example, from Jim Doherty. He's in Boardman, Oregon, which is in Eastern Oregon, borders the Columbia River there, just a spectacular country.

But anyway, he lost in the Republican primary for the Oregon State Senate race, District 29. This recently happened, and here's an observation he brought from the campaign trail.

JIM DOHERTY: As you say, it's generally the woman or the mother who has to juggle their schedule around, their work schedule, to make things work.

When I looked into some assisted child care, looked around. And it looks like for every dollar spent in assisted child care, it lets both parents work full time and get started into their careers and it actually returns $5 to the GDP or $5 to the area. But when I got out on the campaign trail and was suggesting this, folks pushed back, not wanting to, they were looking at it as a subsidy and something they didn't want to do, but we subsidize corporations all the time on their tax breaks.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Calarco, here's what I think of coming out of Jim Doherty's comments there. Maybe we ought to make, or policymakers who wish to try and create a more robust social safety net, ought to do it stealthily. I think the thing, the issue is most Americans don't know how much of their tax dollars go to corporate tax breaks.

Or how much tax revenue the government is missing out because of those things. So like, why not stealthily recast how we talk about the social safety net, so it doesn't actually seem like such a direct subsidy to people?

CALARCO: There is some merit to that idea in the sense that research shows that once you actually build these kinds of social safety nets, it makes people more on board with the idea of having them.

And so certainly putting these policies in place, if we can find a way to do it, will help to reduce some of the pushback. Reduce some of the skepticism around the need for these policies. So I think there's other ways that we could go about this too, in the sense of we can attack some of these myths. We can reject some of the mythical thinking, the kind of meritocratic thinking or sexist thinking that leads us to believe that we don't actually need this kind of social safety net.

We've been guilted and gaslit for decades into believing that we should be able to go it alone, that we don't deserve those kinds of government programs or government supports. And there's a lot of fear mongering that goes into perpetuating those myths too. And what we hope is that we can help to get people to see those myths and to catch themselves in that kind of mythical thinking and use that as a way to push back instead.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to believe that's the case, but I have to say, I'm a little skeptical that it would work ever at the federal level. Because we had that opportunity in terms of COVID relief that came directly to families, that child tax credit, for example. We heard on this show from many people, from all walks of life, all political backgrounds, who said it was a game changer, and they were women, right?

For them and their families. But that went away the second that program was allowed to sunset. It was. So that makes me once again, think of, maybe we shouldn't be looking towards, to the federal level for solutions, because our politics is so captured by money and narrow interest groups.

CHAKRABARTI: Maybe we ought to continue looking at the states. So in that regard, I want to now give here, of what the example is from the state of Colorado. So Angelique Espinoza joins us and she's director of policy at Good Business Colorado and she joins us from Boulder. Welcome to On Point, Angelique.

ANGELIQUE ESPINOZA: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So I'd like to have you quickly describe some of the relatively recent changes regarding some social supports that have come to Coloradans.

ESPINOZA: Sure. We had a very interesting time of it, but we were able to pass a paid family leave in our state. And it seems to be working pretty well so far.

It started years and years ago, when nine to five for working women advocacy organization, has been working toward paid family leave. And it really started to ramp up when we brought the bill to the legislature in 2018. At that time, we had a split legislature and the Republicans sent it to the kill committee.

We weren't too surprised about that. But then in 2019, we brought the bill forward again. It wasn't able to pass, but we were able to get what's called a study bill. So when you can't get something passed, sometimes you can make it a study and move it forward. The really interesting part happened though, in 2020.

In 2020, we had what we call a democratic trifecta in the state of Colorado, meaning all 3, both chambers and the governorship, were controlled by Democrats. And advocates for this bill were thinking, great, this should be easy, but in fact, they were still were not able to pass the bill through the legislature. Because of an inability to get agreement from the parts of the democratic legislature on the details of the bill.

And so in the end, advocates took it to the ballot that year, with polling that suggested 57% support across the state. And indeed, it won at the ballot with over 57% support. So it was overwhelmingly supported by the voters in Colorado.

CHAKRABARTI: Isn't that interesting? Okay. So that may be the sort of the best measure of what people actually want, right?

When you put the question directly to them, that's what politicians say all the time. Let the states manage it. Let the people decide. And they did in Colorado. Okay. Do you think, so this was 2020. I have a question. Do you think COVID had any influence on where people's minds were regarding the need for support?

ESPINOZA: I think that the COVID pandemic really opened our eyes, brought more broadly to where the holes are in our safety net and to what happens when the bottom really falls out. If you recall, the numbers of women who left the workforce versus men during the pandemic were radically more. And it really demonstrated that not only women, but especially women of color and especially women in lower economic brackets, are the ones who are shouldering this burden.

Of unpaid care for family and for people in our society.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so I want just to spend another second on some details, right? Because the devil's always in the details, on how these these policies work. So if I understand correctly, if you are a worker who's made, what, at least $2,500 in a year, you're eligible to apply for this leave program?

ESPINOZA: Yes. If you've earned at least $2,500 and worked for 180 days, which is about six months.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then the premium that people pay into the state to make this happen is, overall, it's 0.9% of an employee's wage, but half of that is paid by the employee, the other half by businesses.

ESPINOZA: Yes, that is the case.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Because I'm just wanting to state these numbers, because it's actually not that much in comparison to say how much you pay in for Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, right? And then according to, let's see, the Colorado PBS coverage, only 3% of private Colorado businesses have chosen not to participate in the program.

That's according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. So the vast majority, 97% are participating in this program.

ESPINOZA: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: What does that tell you?

ESPINOZA: Yeah, it tells you that it's actually desired once it's available, I think. And that really speaks to why our members, our Good Business Colorado members, who are all business owners and employers, actually really supported this, not only at the ballot but also when it was in its bill form and testified in committee about how much smaller businesses really struggle to offer the kinds of benefits that larger companies are able to offer.

Certainly, some larger businesses were offering paid family leave on their own, but a small struggling business, especially as you said, through COVID, something like that, they just can't do it. And so having this program available, gives them, it levels the playing field so they're not at a competitive disadvantage.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Just to be fair though, as you mentioned, there are some requirements that make it not a totally universal program in Colorado, right? So some part time workers don't qualify and workers at some small businesses as well. But You know what? I'd love to check back with you in a couple of years to see how Colorado does with this relatively new paid leave program.