Abstract
In Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment, Aliya Hamid Rao examines the gender differences in how middle-class couples deal with unemployment. Today, there is more precarity than ever in regard to unemployment for people of all social classes. Although in the past there was an ideal of employer-employee loyalty, today, that type of relationship is nearly nonexistent, and being unemployed is increasingly becoming a normal part of work life. This economic precarity, which was once limited to low-wage earners, is now often experienced by many in the American labor market (Lopez and Phillips 2019). Because of this shift in the labor market, Rao wanted to examine what unemployment looked like for middle-class couples. Through examining cultural norms and values surrounding the family, Rao makes a powerful argument that unemployed husbands and wives are treated very differently by their partners and that this differential treatment affects their job search.
To briefly summarize, the book argues that the ways in which couples respond to unemployment reproduce gender inequality. At the beginning of the book, Rao theorizes the ideal job-seeker norm: the idea that an unemployed person should be actively seeking work and spending much of their time applying to jobs, networking, or obtaining skills that could benefit them in their job search. Although the ideal job-seeker norm is not itself gendered, many families push this norm onto unemployed men while blocking women from the same. Through interviews with 72 individuals from 48 different families, Rao shows us how husbands’ and wives’ unemployment are treated unequally and how this difference impacts all of their lives.
More specifically, the book has an introduction, conclusion, and three sections, with each section containing two chapters. In the introduction, Rao explains the background of her study and how she conducted her field work. Chapters one and two examine the differences men and women experience in their space at home. In chapter one, Rao focuses on how being at home can create a lot of tension for men, and as a result, home becomes a place they need to escape from. Some families even create a physical space for men to do their work from home to help them with their job search. On the other hand, chapter two explains how the home is often viewed as a safe space for women during unemployment. Indeed, many women lean into and are encouraged by their partner to spend more time at home with children or on household duties.
Chapters three and four of the book look at how time spent job searching is gendered. In chapter three, Rao describes how men are encouraged to enact the ideal job-seeker norm. In couples where the men were excited about this prospect, the couples often worked together well, with the wives doing their best to support their husbands’ job searches by protecting their husbands’ time. When men struggled with the search, however, there was often tension in the marital relationship. Chapter four demonstrates that although men were expected to fulfill the norm of the ideal job seeker and given the time to do so, women were often not given the same amount of time to look for a new job. Instead, their time filled up with other responsibilities concerning the family. Often, the women relished this new opportunity, but some women felt stifled and were unhappy they had little support from their partners to reenter the workforce.
The third section of the book examines the division of labor in the household after unemployment, specifically trying to address why unemployed men do not do more housework. Chapter five demonstrates that because men’s time is protected by their job search, they are not saddled with more household duties. In contrast, chapter six illustrates how women, who often already did more of the housework, take on even more responsibilities in the home after being unemployed. The book ends with Rao looking forward, arguing that there needs to be more institutional support for families to foster more gender-egalitarian distributions of labor in the home.
Rao does an excellent job discussing gender, interactions, and work and organizations in her book. Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment would be a useful addition to many courses within the sociological discipline, including Sociology of Gender, Sociology of Work and Organizations, and Sociology of the Family. The book’s three sections could also be assigned as stand-alone readings because they contrast men’s and women’s experiences well. For example, the third section of the book would work particularly well in classes that examine the household division of labor in any meaningful way. Additionally, because of the appendices focused on how Rao collected her data, the book could be an excellent case study for a Qualitative Research Methods course. Bartholomay’s (2016) TRAILS activity “Gender Inequality in Unpaid Work” is an excellent in-class activity that would connect nicely to this book because of its focus on how household labor is gendered. After reading Rao’s work, students could complete the “Gender Inequality in Unpaid Work” activity (Bartholomay 2016) to further help them understand how household labor is gendered but also help them generate solutions to help alleviate this inequality. This book is particularly timely given the recent COVID-19 pandemic, with its related rise of unemployment and childcare strains on families. This book speaks to the challenges many families faced and continue to face today.
In her book, Rao communicates complicated ideas using easy-to-understand language that can be digested by a variety of readers. Although some background knowledge is useful to fully understand the book, Rao does an excellent job providing enough background to make it accessible even to those without a background in the field. Therefore, the book could be used at any level of sociological instruction and would make a great addition to an Introduction to Sociology class to help show students how social structures like the economy and gender affect people’s lives.
One limitation of the book is that it centers on a particular type of family: straight, married, middle-class couples. Although this is an excellent resource for understanding the dynamics surrounding unemployment for these specific families, instructors would want to be careful not to generalize the experiences of the couples in this book to all couples facing unemployment. One possible resource to help overcome this limitation would be Damaske’s (2020) article “Job Loss and Attempts to Return to Work: Complicating Inequalities across Gender and Class.” This article would help shed light on the experiences of working-class people who are unemployed, illustrating how multiple aspects of identity besides only gender influence people’s experiences with unemployment.
Overall, Rao does an excellent job discussing the gender differences between how unemployed partners navigate this unemployment. The book demonstrates how gender inequalities persist in the home, even among couples who think of themselves as more egalitarian. It also shows how gendered ideals and norms affect how people navigate unemployment. With its focus on work and organizations, the family, and gender, Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment would be an excellent pedagogical addition to a variety of sociology classes.