Name: "Other Countries Have Social Safety Nets; The US Has Women": In-Person Badger Talk in Watertown, WI
Start: 2025-04-24T18:30:00-05:00
Location: Watertown Public Library

"Other Countries Have Social Safety Nets; The US Has Women": In-Person Badger Talk in Watertown, WI

Join us for this free, in-person event on April 24, 2025, at 6:30 PM at the Watertown Public Library. No registration is required. Hosted by the AAUW (American Association of University Women) Watertown Branch, this talk is part of the AAUW Membership Meeting and is open to the public. AAUW’s mission is to provide educational opportunities for local women, fostering knowledge and personal growth. For more information visit their website: https://watertown.librarycalendar.com/events/month/2025/04
The late 1970s marked the beginning of the “great risk shift,” in which US policymakers moved responsibility for people’s wellbeing away from government and employers and onto individuals and their families, instead. In this talk, Dr. Jessica Calarco reveals how US families have dealt with that increased burden–by shifting the risk onto women, including women within families and, if they have the means to do so, onto other women less privileged than them. Calarco will also discuss the implications of this gendered risk shift for families, employers, and the country as a whole, and she will offer recommendations for building the kind of coalition that will be necessary to shift responsibility for risk back the other way.
Presenter Jessica (Jess) Calarco is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Calarco has published three books: Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School, A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum, and Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (with Mario Luis Small). Calarco’s fourth book, She’ll Fix It, will be published in 2024 by Penguin Random House and reveals how US families, schools, employers, and policymakers get away with treating women as their social safety net, and forcing women to bear the risk of precarity, rather than demanding or building the kind of sturdy social scaffolding that would better support us all. Calarco has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, CNN, Insider Higher Ed, and Business Insider. Calarco has also been featured on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and other radio and television news outlets, and has contributed quotes to dozens of news stories in a wide range of national and international news outlets from the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine to Scientific American and the Chronicle of Higher Education, to Glamour and Good Housekeeping and Ms. Magazine. Calarco has also offered expert testimony as part of a Congressional briefings on families’ decisions regarding Covid-19 vaccines, and she has worked closely with local policymakers on initiatives related to digital equity and to supporting families and children in times of need.