‘Holding it Together’ 

As women disproportionately struggled with increased care work in the pandemic’s early months, sociologist Jessica Calarco in an interview summed up the dynamic like this: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

Nearly four years later, Calarco’s published a book on the topic, called Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin). Out today, it’s based on five years of qualitative research, including survey work and hundreds of hours of interviews with women who describe being pushed into undervalued care work, both personally and professionally, by a “DIY society” that sees them as an ever-flowing resource. (“America runs on women” is one of the promotional taglines for the book. Intended or not, its similarity to popular coffee brand’s slogan, “American runs on Dunkin,” is tragicomically poignant.)

“Women shouldn’t have to be doing so much for so little,” Calarco argues early on. “And they wouldn’t have to if we had a real social safety net. With the right investments and policies, countries can protect people from exploitation and grant them dignity throughout their lives.”

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While Holding it Together isn’t exclusively a higher education book, it does have implications for higher ed—including how institutions can better support students who are parents and, even more to the point, how institutions can collectively use what Calarco has called sociological imagination to demand more public support for all students.

The word “college” appears 194 times in Holding it Together, in data-rich footnotes, about, say, the inequities driving different college completion rates for white and Black students, as well as in numerous women’s own life stories.

Take Brooke, for example. She and her boyfriend were what Brooke calls “typical college kids,” until they unintentionally got pregnant and he “decided that he would rather finish school.” Brooke hoped that she could live with her parents and attempt the same. But the working family couldn’t afford childcare. This ultimately pushed Brooke out of college, onto public assistance and into a low-wage job in retail. Later, she said yes when her son’s childcare center—struggling with staff turnover—recruited her to work there. The pay was minimal, but it came with free childcare; previously she’d been paying as much for that as she was in rent. But even a promotion to assistant director a few years in only bumped her salary to $25,000. The raise also translated to a cut in her public assistance. Brooke has hopes of becoming a nurse, but caring duties continue to put that dream out of reach.

A college degree isn’t a panacea to the social problems Calarco describes in her book; even women with or working toward advanced degrees struggle and become default caregivers in the home. Virginia, a tenure-track professor whose husband makes much less in salary and does much less around the house—in part because of the perceived flexibility of Virginia’s job—laments that she’d love actual time for her research. “I love thinking. And I would love to be able to do that again sometimes.” What does Virginia need? “I need childcare. I need the child tax credit to come back. I need a financial cushion. I need time and reliable care for my children. I need consistency. I need institutions to step up and do what they are supposed to do to be humane.”

Still, clearer pathways to and through college, including for parents, are part of the solution Calarco proposes: a true social safety net and what she calls a “union of care.” Calarco endorses ideas including free college and universal childcare, and it’s worth noting here that groups such as New America consider childcare a basic need for the one in five college students who are parents.

Calarco, who’s previously published A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (2020) and Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (2018), began researching what became Holding it Together prior to the pandemic, while an associate professor of sociology at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The pandemic changed the scope of her work somewhat (go figure), and she’s also switched institutions, to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She agreed to chat about her process and findings, and their implications for student success. An edited version of the interview appears below.

Q: First off, congratulations on the book, which is getting a lot of attention. Why do you think it’s striking such a chord? 

A: Part of it stems from the way that the pandemic played out, in the sense that we had this moment in 2021, 2022, where it seemed like we would actually learn something—where it seemed like we might actually have a chance at building back better. We’d put in place these policies that were highly effective for families, for communities, for individuals—everything from student loan moratoriums, to additional child tax credits, to free school lunches at the K-12 level, to COVID stimulus payments. It even seemed like we might go further, putting in place universal childcare, paid universal paid family leave, potentially even free college. All that seemed like it was on the table for a little while.

And then things all fell apart. And so it became this question of, “How did things go so wrong? How did we get so close to a possible future, and then end up in a place where, once again, we’ve just sort of said, ‘We don’t really have to, because we can rely on women to do this work instead.’” And that seems to very much be the playbook that we’ve followed as a society. 

Q: That’s certainly something that we’ve been thinking about, in terms of higher ed: To what extent was this moment of possible change seized on?

A: We learned a lot of lessons, but we haven’t done much to actually implement them, whether it’s on the navigating-the-cost-of college side of the equation, or actually having the kind of life supports that students need to be in a place so they can learn and learn effectively.

Q: This isn’t a higher ed book, per se, but it does have some higher ed angles. So can you share a bit about your research and where student success fits in?

A: It just felt like a moral imperative to tell these stories and to capture what was going on for these families and how they were navigating the kinds of hardship that they were facing—and the ways that women were expected to pick up the pieces on so many fronts, whether that was childcare, eldercare or in a situation where they were picking up colleagues’ work because of staffing shortages. I mean, there were so many ways that this work was disproportionately hitting women.

In terms of higher ed, there were a number of places where that kind of shined through in the data. One is that our current higher ed policies don’t work well with motherhood, in the sense that a number of the women who were part of our study had gotten pregnant, often unintentionally while they were in college, and ended up pushed out of college because the kinds of support structures that were available were not able to accommodate their needs simultaneously as students and as mothers.

Q: One of the things you cover is how barriers to abortion services, affordable childcare and paid leave can derail women in their efforts to seek out and obtain undergraduate and graduate degrees. You refer to this as the motherhood trap, which can ultimately push women into poverty and underpaid care work jobs—much like Brooke. Just connecting the dots a bit more, what is the connection between access to reproductive and childcare services, educational attainment and women’s place in the economy?

A: What happens is that in the absence of universal childcare and universal paid family leave—especially in the context of attacks on abortion and contraception—women who become pregnant when it’s not their ideal timing often don’t have the flexibility or the resources or support to be able to continue in college. Instead, if they don’t have family resources or personal resources, they often end up relying on limited government programs that we do have, things like welfare. And those programs come with work requirements that are extremely stringent and also deeply punitive in the sense that you essentially have to take whatever job you can get.

Many of those women who end up on welfare end up in part-time, very low-wage positions in fields like retail, childcare and home health care, because these are the best jobs that are available to them on a short-term basis—without the college degrees or credentials that they could rely on to potentially get a better job. This is a sort of pipeline, and we fail to provide women the kinds of supports that they would need to be able to continue in college or pursue their degrees if they get pregnant.

It also makes it very difficult to afford the kind of care or the kind of support that these women might need to be able to then go back to college later on. 

Q: How can colleges and universities help out here? What can they do better to support pregnant students or students who are parents? And then, of course, what financial and logistical barriers stand in the way of those efforts—and what larger policy changes might be needed? 

A: This is a space where colleges and universities right now have to navigate a whole lot of these decisions with limited resources. They have to figure out childcare for their employees, they have to figure out health care for students and for employees. But if they were to lobby together—if they were to come together as universities instead of competing with each other, if they focused on how to use their leverage as large, powerful elite institutions—to pressure lawmakers to make different decisions about what our social safety net looks like, they could potentially offload some of that responsibility. 

There are things that universities and colleges can do in the short term. Budgets are hard, but I’d say more flexibility with respect to policies and accommodating and recognizing that many of our college students today are not traditional-aged college students. We have lots of folks who have young children, who are parents, who have other types of care responsibilities that they’re trying to navigate in the context of their schooling. Let’s be mindful of that and the way that we design our courses and course policies, our expectations for student completion. I think all of these could better accommodate a new reality of what college looks like, one which doesn’t presume a student can devote 100 percent of their attention to school. 

Q: Switching gears somewhat, some of the talk on gender equity in higher ed lately centers on men’s lack of attainment, relative to women’s. As you certainly know, men are now less likely to enroll in and complete college than women. Any thoughts on how this dynamic affects what you’re investigating regarding women? 

A: The college wage premium has changed differently for men and for women over time. We see that for women, it still makes a lot of sense financially to go to college, given the bump in pay associated with jobs open to those with college degrees. But also, given the gender pay gap in terms of what men and women are making overall, to even have a shot at getting close to men’s salaries, women have to go to college and often have to get graduate degrees.

Part of it stems from the different types of incentives that exist in our larger economy that make it feel more imperative for women to go to college to even have a shot at a stable life financially. There are more options for men who don’t have college degrees to pursue high-paying jobs, in ways that there just aren’t for women. There’s also the structure of our economy and the way that we push women into these kinds of underpaid jobs that are so labor-intensive and hard to outsource. So we need government subsidies for those kinds of feminized careers. 

Q: In the book, you show that going to college and even pursuing degrees and careers in STEM don’t necessarily insulate women from gendered social and economic traps. Ultimately, what does having a degree or degrees and subsequent access to good jobs do for women—and what doesn’t that guarantee? 

A: I talk about how women who are in STEM fields often have to take on huge amounts of debt to be able to pursue both high-status and advanced degrees if they want to not only have an entry-level job, but compete to stay on the corporate ladder. And for women who are in those positions, it affects their life choices. It makes it so that they end up delaying parenthood, often in ways that require them to use things like fertility services that affect their relationships with partners.

Many of the women that we talked to who were on that corporate track, often in STEM fields, felt a lot of ambivalence about it. Their employers often didn’t respect them, and as women they faced a lot of gendered harassment or gendered under-investments from their bosses—even from other women who were higher up. I talked to one mom, for example, who was in a director role in a large tech firm and talked about how a senior woman colleague told her that she shouldn’t apply for her boss’s job when it became available because she should wait until her kids were older.

You’re expected to be that mom at home, as opposed to investing in your career. And that contributes to what the research shows, that pay gaps actually get bigger between men and women the higher up the career ladder they climb. So even when women are able to pursue these kinds of high-powered STEM jobs or high-powered tech jobs, they’re often not compensated the way that men are because of motherhood penalties, and because of how they’re perceived and treated in these deeply gendered ways. 

Q: Related to obtaining degrees and even advanced degrees, how does the college debt crisis factor in, and how are women—and maybe even mothers, in particular—affected?

A: Of the couples we talked to, many of them had tried to go to college but ended up dropping out, in part because the costs got so high, and that often set them up for very difficult work trajectories—particularly for women, in ways that pushed them into the kinds of low-paying jobs that made it difficult for them to have egalitarian relationships with their partners. And it pushed them on this track of becoming the default parent, and sometimes into stay-at-home motherhood, even when that’s not where they wanted to be.

It sets them up for this trajectory of both trying to fill in the gaps in the short-term, but then being stuck with the short end of the stick when things go wrong. Whether it’s through widowhood or through divorce or family breakup, or just through job loss of a partner, women often end up in these very precarious situations because of how—especially if they’re unable to afford college—that puts them on track to fall into these default caregiver roles in ways that limit their stability financially, long-term. 

What has your institution done to promote course policies that help accommodate students who are parents? Tell us about it.