Kimberly Kay Hoang
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Kimberly Kay Hoang
“Crunch Time is masterful. I picked up the book and could not put it down! Rao powerfully takes us into the private lives of middle-class American couples at their most vulnerable time: unemployment. A tale of two unemployments, Crunch Time details how unemployed men and women adopt the ideal job seeker norm in divergently gendered ways in the face of economic precarity. For unemployed men, seeking a new job becomes a full-time effort, while unemployed women retreat into the home and into intense carework as a vocation. A heart-wrenching, hopeful, and captivating book, this is a must-read. While ninety-two percent of the labor market will experience unemployment, Crunch Time forecasts us into an even bleaker future, as the rise of technology and artificial intelligence will surely threaten any form of economic security for all Americans.” (from Amazon)
Aliya Hamid Rao(you?)
Aliya Hamid Rao(you?)
In Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviors are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.