How the DIY economy hurts women

As the protectors, women are tasked with being the default parents , housekeepers , kin-keepers , health managers , budget managers , and volunteers . They’re the ones who take care of elderly family members and other relatives who’ve found themselves down and out financially, struggling emotionally, or in need of support with their own responsibilities for care. They’re the ones bearing primary responsibility not only for taking care of family members who are sick but for all the work it takes to keep them safe and well, including researching and avoiding potential health threats, taking them to the doctor for checkups, managing medications, and ensuring that their family members are eating nutritiously and getting plenty of exercise. And they’re often the ones who do the inventory and the planning and the shopping, the ones who know how much is left in the checking account or the cash jar, and the ones who figure out how to make ends meet when money is short.



Women also keep this country running by filling the underpaid jobs in our economy —accepting low wages to keep the costs of goods and services more affordable for everyone else. As of 2023, women represented 47% of the total U.S. workforce , but they held nearly 70% of the lowest-wage jobs , and they earned only 73 cents for every dollar earned by men . The picture is a little better if we only consider full-time employed women. Those women are earning 83 cents for every dollar that men do (albeit with bigger gaps for Black and Latina women and for mothers). But focusing on full-time employed women ignores women who’ve been pushed into part-time, part-year, and often low-wage labor because those are the only jobs they can get .



Women shouldn’t have to be doing so much for so little. 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.



Rather than build that kind of sturdy social safety net , the U.S. has slashed holes in the meager net we do have and left the remainder to wither and rot. Policymakers have kept the federal minimum wage stalled at $7.25 an hour for decades, allowed states to chip away at the value of welfare benefits and institute work requirements and time limits for government assistance, and attacked the unions that could fight for higher pay or essential protections like guaranteed paid leave, safe working conditions, reasonable work hours, retirement pensions, and overtime pay. In the process, they’ve left forty million Americans struggling to keep a roof over their heads , thirty-four million without sufficient food to eat , and thirty million without health insurance . And they’ve left more than thirty-five million American kids attending under-resourced schools and nine million without access to affordable childcare .



Without a net, societies crumble. That’s why people in the U.S. are more depressed , more sick , and more likely to die young than people in other high-income countries. It’s why we work longer hours but produce less . Why we have a higher poverty rate . Why our economy isn’t growing as fast . And why we have more political unrest .



The situation would likely be even worse if women weren’t filling in the gaps in our economy and our threadbare safety net. In the absence of a robust social safety net, the U.S. avoids catastrophe and keeps our society and our economy from crumbling by relying on women as the invisible glue.



The DIY Society



It’s easy to assume that the situation was always this dire. And yet, there have been moments throughout our history as a country where things could have gone another way.



Consider Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal . During the decades following the Great Depression, U.S. civic and corporate leaders adopted a shared sense of obligation to preserve collective well-being. They created Social Security and Medicare. They passed minimum wage laws and established the forty-hour workweek. They offered health insurance and pensions for workers when they retired. Following World War II, however, and as with the closure of the childcare centers the government built with funding from the Lanham Act, the U.S. put the brakes on efforts to expand the social safety net and then began to dismantle the net we already had .



As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain in The Big Myth , that shift was first engineered by a group of ultra-wealthy businessmen in the 1930s in the U.S. These men, many of whom were associated with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), didn’t want to pay for Roosevelt’s social safety net. So they set off in search of a way to make people believe that our country would be just as safe—or even better off—without a net.



What they found was neoliberalism —the idea that people and corporations should be free to pursue and keep whatever profit they can generate without support or interference from the state. Put differently, neoliberalism is a belief in social and economic survival of the fittest. It’s the insistence that people and corporations should try to get ahead by whatever means necessary (even cheating—since rules go against the whole spirit of freedom anyway), that those who fall behind aren’t deserving of sympathy, and that those who get ahead should be celebrated, regardless of the means they used to reach those ends.



In the 1930s and ’40s, NAM members paid to import the Austrian economists who developed neoliberalism and install them in elite U.S. universities, where they would train the next generation of American economists. Those trainees included Milton Friedman, who is famous for arguing that a corporation’s only job is “to make as much money as possible” for its shareholders, and that taxes and regulations should be cut “under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”



NAM then leaned on Friedman for guidance in launching a massive pro-business propaganda campaign. They co-opted popular radio and television programs and set up neoliberal think tanks to convince the American public that society wouldn’t fall apart—and might even be better off—without a net. Their message included two core arguments that still permeate popular thinking and policymaking , despite the lack of evidence to support these claims . First, that if we lower taxes on billionaires and big corporations, the money they save will “trickle down” to the rest of us. And second, that if we don’t have a social safety net, we won’t need one because people will make better choices and keep themselves safe.



These claims had a certain truthiness to them. With the backing of venerated economists and pop culture figures, they were easy for the public to accept. That acceptance then paved the way for the election of neoliberal politicians, most of them Republicans but also Independents and even some Democrats, including pro-union-Democrat-turned-anti-union-Republican Ronald Reagan , who hosted the NAM-funded General Electric Theater as part of their propaganda campaign. In the spirit of you-scratch-my-back- I’ll-scratch-yours, politicians like Reagan then installed neoliberal economists like Friedman in powerful policymaking positions, where they still predominate today .



From that position of influence, these neoliberal economists and their cronies engineered what political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “ the great risk shift ” in his book by the same name. By cutting taxes and regulations and slashing social welfare spending, they shifted responsibility for Americans’ well-being away from the government and from employers and onto individuals and families. We now spend a smaller percentage of our GDP on social programs than we have at any point in U.S. history, with that percentage projected to fall even further in the years ahead.



Through its budget cuts and rhetoric of “good choices,” the great risk shift made us into what I call a “DIY society”: one where people are expected to solve their own problems, rather than count on the government or even their employers to support them. And one where people who fail to solve their own problems are shamed and denied support.



In exchange for our DIY efforts, the engineers of the great risk shift promised widespread prosperity—prosperity that would support workers and families in facing the added risk they were handed. But that promise never panned out. Rates of economic growth in the U.S. were actually lower in the thirty years following the great risk shift than they were during the thirty years before, and the growth that did occur never trickled down . Instead, billionaires and big corporations took all the extra money they saved by lowering taxes and loosening regulations and held on to it as tightly as they could . As a result, and after accounting for inflation, low-income and middle-income households in the US actually have less wealth today than they had twenty years ago . Only the highest-income households are better off wealth-wise, and they’ve continued to accumulate larger and larger shares of the total US wealth.



Maintaining the illusion



That DIY society is merely an illusion. An illusion that seems real because of the magic that women perform. As I’ll show in this book, families in the U.S. accepted the responsibilities—and the risks—that came with a DIY society because they could dump them onto women . And because they could trust that women would either find a way to carry that weight or find someone else to dump it on —usually another woman more vulnerable than them . In essence, the U.S. has decided that we can get by without a social safety net because women will protect us instead.



That choice is drowning women and leaving our whole society sicker, sadder, and more stressed. Yet the engineers and profiteers of our DIY society refuse to see women struggling, because acknowledging those struggles would shatter the illusion. Ignoring women leaves us exactly where they want us—keeping society afloat without any buoy to hold us, and so out of breath that no one can hear us if we cry.



The magic of women makes the idea of a DIY society seem plausible and makes it seem—despite all the hard evidence to the contrary—like Friedman and his cronies were right. When women can make something out of nothing, then it’s easy to assume that the free-market proponents were correct all along—that we really can get by without a net.



The reality, of course, is that women aren’t actually holding it together, or at least not as well as it might seem . As I’ll show in this book, being the stand-in for the social safety net has taken a serious toll on women and left their families and communities less secure. I’ll also examine how we’ve managed to persuade women (or force them, in some cases) to be the glue that holds it all together. And I’ll consider why no one seems to care (or even believe) that women are being torn apart.







Excerpted from Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net by Jessica Calarco, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Jessica Calarco, 2024.