Aliya Hamid Rao, "Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment" (U California Press, 2020)

New Books in Sociology · Jul 23, 2020 · 58m

In Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment (University of California Press, 2020), 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…