Transcript
Alyssa Hurst:
You're listening to RadioEd, a University of Denver podcast.
Lorne Fultonberg:
We're your hosts Lorne Fultonberg.
Alyssa Hurst:
Alyssa Hurst.
Nicole Militello:
And I'm Nicole Militello. For so many this past year has not been easy, and for this episode we wanted to specifically focus on mothers during the pandemic. Recent census numbers are revealing a clear picture of what's been going on. Around 3.5 million mothers living with school-aged children left active work last spring, switching to paid or unpaid leave, losing their job, or just leaving the job market altogether. Overall, that's a much greater decrease for women than we saw with men. In a society where on average women typically carry a heavier burden of care work, like unpaid household responsibilities and childcare, the sudden shutdown of daycares, schools, and workplaces created a situation that was nearly impossible to juggle for many, and new data shows that nonwhite single moms were hit the hardest.
Nicole Militello:
We wanted to talk about some of these struggles with the Director of the Gender and Women's Studies program at the University of Denver, and a mom herself, Lindsay Feitz.
Lindsey Feitz:
In preparation for this.
Nicole Militello:
Yeah.
Lindsey Feitz:
Thank you for having me on, by the way, I talked to a couple of my working mom friends, I was like, "What would you want me to say?" And ironically, or maybe not so ironically, in one conversation our kids were screaming, so we couldn't finish. The other was a text message and she was like, "I'm too tired from work, let's try to catch up another time." And the third was like, "I've got a work call, I can't talk." And so I was like, whoa, yes, that's it, that could be the podcast right there is what is the message? that we're just all getting pulled in 5 million directions.
Nicole Militello:
Mom's being pulled in different directions is just a fraction of this conversation. She shares how important it is to acknowledge motherhood comes in all different forms, and we first need to start with setting the stage of where we were at prior to the pandemic.
Lindsey Feitz:
There's a couple main things I think you have to acknowledge before COVID, and that is that the nature of mothering and work has already been pretty precarious. And I say that because I don't know if sometimes people separate mothering and the different types of work, I think most of the time I'm talking about professional women, but that mothering and working doesn't have a singular path, but it's very much rooted in issues of class, and issues of race, and issues of education. Not to mention issues of married moms, straight couples who have maybe amazing male partners who are stepping up and doing amazing work, or maybe they have amazing male partners where they haven't had time to have a conversation.
Nicole Militello:
Great point.
Lindsey Feitz:
But the main stage, pre-COVID, we know that care work is hard, we know that it's invisible. We know that we've got single moms out there, we've got professional moms, and we know that the wage gap is real. So before COVID, we already know the intersectional argument that it's not just 82 cents to a dollar, that it's significantly less for Hispanic and black women.
Lindsey Feitz:
I think the motherhood penalty has been out there for a while, and for listeners who don't know that there's the motherhood penalty and the father had premium associated with work outside the home. So when moms stay home with sick kids or have to miss that important networking happy hour because so and so has to be picked up from soccer practices, there's a ding that happens, and maybe it's not explicit, but we call that the motherhood penalty box, where workplace culture and family life balance tends to come out negatively for mom, whereas for a lot of men, they get looked at as amazing dads because they have to step out and go get their daughter from soccer.
Lindsey Feitz:
So all of these things, so there's gender roles, there's the workplace culture that I think, without meaning too, often penalizes working moms, and then there's intersectional wage gap stuff. So all of this exists, not to mention just an insane amount of money and resources, and a very fragile daycare system. And so all of this is mixing before COVID, and that drum roll is the stage where then March comes, and I think we can say that we've now seen all of those disparities and fragilities really exploded.
Nicole Militello:
Can you point to anything specific over the past year that has really stuck out, of those disparities, that have really been exasperated the most?
Lindsey Feitz:
Yeah, I think when we think about job losses, who had to step out of work to take care of kids. Daycare shut, support systems, maybe grandma or aunties were watching kids a few days a week, but when people got locked down, moms more than dads, and I know dads were impacted too, but more moms ended up staying home and either losing wages if they were in hourly wage jobs, or stepping back from big professional assignments. So while professional women maybe didn't lose jobs, I would argue maybe lost some opportunity and some traction.
Lindsey Feitz:
So when I think about this issue, I think about just the big, giant slide that women took, different levels for different women, but when you cumulatively think about lost earnings, lost career advancement, lost jobs, not to mention just potential getting COVID, or being in a family where you're exposed. If there was traction, it certainly stopped, and I obviously know it's not the same for all women, and I know that dads were affected too. Research shows, and anecdotally, that it tended to be moms navigating that.
Nicole Militello:
Yeah, and I think that, like you were saying, we've seen them take maybe a wage hit, or having to step back from responsibilities, but a lot of working moms were forced just to leave their job altogether.
Lindsey Feitz:
Totally.
Nicole Militello:
We really haven't seen those jobs come back. So what longterm implications does it have for women in the workforce?
Lindsey Feitz:
It has, yeah, I want to say everything from wage earnings, like I just mentioned, people have been tracking homeownership, retirement, poverty, food scarcity. If you are a single mom and you lose your hourly wage job, if you talk to food banks, you talk to diaper banks, so it's the gamut of, so when I say lost wages it's not just, oh, women are losing a million over a lifetime in a professional white collar setting, it's no, women can't feed their kids right now. Some women. Yeah, the home ownership and the retirement one was on one side, and then the not being able to feed your kids and having to take them out to a food bank is on the other.
Lindsey Feitz:
I don't know any of my working mom friends that have had space to think about where their professionals futures are going, that just stopped with COVID. I think it's like, "Have I showered? Can I get myself to my Zoom meeting on time and not cry today because X, Y, Z has happened, or my childcare, my third nanny fell through and my mom can't help me because she's older," you know what I mean? Villages disappeared overnight. And so, I don't know, I think that's the part that makes me really sad when I stop and think about it is there's the real life consequences, but then there's the imagining your future as a professional woman, and I just think people in my world are so overwhelmed right now that they're having a hard time imagining what their professional non-mom life is going to look like, because mom-ing is taking up so much space right now.
Nicole Militello:
What would you say about what the pandemic has taught us about the reality of where gender roles stand in 2020?
Lindsey Feitz:
I think it shows that they exist, they're so real, and I think it's teaching us that care work, which we've all been relying on, anybody that has a kid in daycare or a kid under five before they're in kindergarten, how undervalued, underpaid, and how fragile it is when it goes away. I just think it's highlighting things we thought that we had under control, I think this pandemic certainly shows that, especially if you have little kids that require full-time care, how hard that is and how much value that we should put on the people doing that.
Nicole Militello:
And so one economist, Betsy Stevenson, told the New York Times, "COVID took a crowbar into gender gaps and pried them wide open." And so she worries about having a generation who's watching working moms struggle right now, and maybe making them just not want to be parents at all. What do you think about that?
Lindsey Feitz:
I mean, I'm laughing, but in this sick, sad way over here. Yes, I think she's right. I think it's not even just future generations, I personally know people, couples and single women, who were thinking about kids and they are looking around, they're looking at me saying, "No, nope. I'm going to find a way to be a mom, I can mother in different ways rather than have a child." But I think younger generations in particular are looking around now and they see how expensive it is, they see, hey, all these women that said that you could be a surgeon, or you could be president and you could have your family, I think younger folks are cluing in that that might've been a myth, or if not a myth, it's been sugarcoated a little bit.
Lindsey Feitz:
And so I think you compound that with climate change, and not having enough water, and hearing people talk about how daycare is more than their mortgage. It's heartbreaking because obviously I'm a mom, I love my kid, I can't imagine not being a mom, but I can also completely understand why someone looking from the outside would be like, this is almost impossible to do right now.
Nicole Militello:
Yeah. And so the New York Times did this big series on working moms during the pandemic, and so one of the articles was called How Society Has Turned Its Back on Mothers, this isn't just about burnout, it's about betrayal.
Lindsey Feitz:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nicole Militello:
And the author in that piece argues that mental health burnout that mothers are experiencing is because of a lack of support, and that was a societal choice. So when we're having this conversation, what could we have done differently a year ago to better support working moms during this time?
Lindsey Feitz:
Well, I mean, luckily there's just really smart policy folks who just put out a nice 53 page Institute for Women's Policy Research, if any policy wonk heads want to look at it. But they're saying the things that I think researchers and feminists have known for a long time, invest in childcare, invest in healthcare, invest in the minimum wage, invest in workplace flexibility, invest in policies that prioritize and demonstrate the awareness that having a family and being a caretaker, whether that's an aging parent, or a new baby, requires a certain amount of understanding of the institutions that we're part of, as well as, as a society.
Lindsey Feitz:
So I don't know, I always like to think, in World War II, if we could have daycare while women went to factories and that was a national legislative policy, there was a will, there was a need, and it happened, it gives me both hope and also makes me a little sad to know that we can do this. I think as a society we can do this, and it's been done before, we just have to decide our values. And if we're going to say that we value gender equity and working moms, and supporting families, we have to recognize that little people and old people have traditionally been under the domain of women's care. And so how are we going to do that? I do think that there are some policy oriented specifics that I'm more optimistic are now coming to the national conversation.
Nicole Militello:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And we talked about this a little bit earlier, you mentioned it, just how the struggles within working moms, the struggles aren't equal for everyone.
Lindsey Feitz:
Right.
Nicole Militello:
So can you talk a little bit more about what segments of working moms were impacted the most by this pandemic?
Lindsey Feitz:
Yeah, definitely low wage, low income women. So I want to be really clear, this doesn't mean that professional women haven't had it rough, but if you have a house, if you have the ability to still buy food, if you're not taking your kids to a food bank, if you have a job, if you are not in the hospital with COVID, then you're in better shape than, unfortunately a lot of women. So I think when you look at the numbers of people who lost their job, women, during the pandemic, women were four times more likely, and it wasn't necessarily professional women, it was women in the service industry, women working in retail, women working, again, hourly wage jobs, and when jobs came back, and this is the thing, when jobs came back, not all those women came back, and a lot of that had to do with childcare.
Lindsey Feitz:
So jobs came back, but you didn't have a place to take your kid. And I can bring my son, well, I mean, he's at home, but you know what I mean. I've made my motherhood visible on this campus, most women can't do that. Do you know what I mean? And so I think it's really important to note that the costs and consequences have definitely been bigger for low wage low-income women.
Nicole Militello:
And so as life slowly starts to return to some sort of new normal, what concerns do you have as we move forward for working moms, or moms in general?
Lindsey Feitz:
We'll just keep trucking and we won't use this as an opportunity to learn and grow, not just as moms, but as a society. So my fear is that there's going to be such a rush to go back to normal, and the truth is for a lot of working moms, normal wasn't really equal. You know what I mean? So I think for getting the lessons and the visibility that's coming out of here is, oh, that would be such a missed opportunity. So I'm hoping employers and government and local communities are taking note.
Nicole Militello:
And so what are maybe some possible solutions or ways that we could address those damages in the mental health toll as we're forward?
Lindsey Feitz:
Yeah, I mean, there's external big public policy stuff that I think is happening. I don't know if it's going to happen, but everything from how to figure out how to help people with daycare costs, how to give early childhood educators a living wage and to say that we value what you do because we're giving you our children for 40 hours a week sometimes, or more for some folks. So again, I think there's structural policy based things, paid family sick leave, all of that good stuff.
Lindsey Feitz:
I also hope, and this doesn't really apply to my family situation, but that on an interpersonal level that people, if they have time, if they have energy, who have partners, if you are living in a family where there are two parents, that have real conversations about what equity looks like and whose job, whose career, who's going to skip the meeting to take the kid, or to just help them with their online schooling. I think that's a feminist pipe dream. People in my circle, I think, do that, but I don't think most people do. I think they're too busy, and so we default to gender roles.
Nicole Militello:
And can you speak a little bit to how other countries have handled the pandemic compared to the US when it comes to supporting working women?
Lindsey Feitz:
I do think it's pretty safe to say that any country that has invested more in a social safety net for early childhood, where there is daycare, preschool, where there's a bigger social safety net, women tend to fare better there because some of that burden, a lot of that burden is shared, and so it's not just a private family matter of how we're going to take care of our aging grandma and our newborn baby, it is actually a social contract where there's resources, and I just don't think we're quite there yet as a country,
Nicole Militello:
We've talked so much about just the struggles, but I also think the pandemic highlighted how resilient women are, not that it needed to, or it should have.
Lindsey Feitz:
Right, right.
Nicole Militello:
But It did.
Lindsey Feitz:
Yeah.
Nicole Militello:
And I was just wondering, what are your thoughts on that?
Lindsey Feitz:
Yeah, I think people are doing the impossible every day. I think moms are doing the impossible, and again, I don't want to generalize all moms, but before I became a mom, a good friend told me, moms are not allowed to get sick. Until they're in the ER, moms, that's what you're signing up for. And boy, I think she's right. And I think women have supported other women, I think there've been amazing male allies who have supported women, I think, compared to 50 years ago, and how fatherhood looks really, I think for a lot of men, quite different. And so yeah, the resilience part, I think we can't underestimate and we should all be really proud of ourselves.
Lindsey Feitz:
I do think people found communities in different ways, too. Social media is not my go-to, but boy, having a group of other single moms, daycares that are open, daycare closures, nanny recommendations, I see people in my neighborhood posting about food banks, I see other neighbors soliciting food for food banks and diapers, so that part of my heart and spirit gets a little warm thinking that, okay, there is an acknowledgement that we do need each other, and so that part, I think, has been, I hope, a lesson that we can all remember too moving forward.
Nicole Militello:
To read the new us census numbers, or for more information on mothering during the pandemic visit our show notes at DU.edu/radioed. Alyssa Hurst is our executive producer, James Swearingen arranged our theme, and Tamar Chapman is our managing editor. I'm Nicole Militello, and this is RadioEd.
