If you've been getting our weekly jobs emails, this is something different. This is our newsletter about the bigger picture: why the tension between work and family feels so hard, and whether it has to.
Groundwork’s mission is to rebuild how we work, by creating systemic access to (predominantly) non-full-time positions. Tactically, we're chipping away at our mission by working with employers to create and hire for these types of roles from our candidate pool of moms and other caregivers. We chose this direction because placing people in roles that actually fit their lives feels like both a feasible, impactful place to start and is realistically within our zone of “something we can do.”
But outside of our day-to-day work on this mission, thinking about the broader landscape of factors that led us to this point to begin with is interesting and useful. The current state of work and family in the US is one of misalignment:
The cost of childcare is rising 1.5x faster than overall inflation, lapping income gains1
The gender wage gap persists despite women outpacing men in education2
There’s an estimated $70B lost annually due to childcare disruptions during the workday3
Or a very obvious one: the school day ends at 3pm and the workday ends at 6pm
Flavors of these problems are felt by each of us individually, but they’re not individual problems. They’re systemic design problems.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to understand to what extent our problems are solvable. History and other countries are a useful place to look, to ask questions like: What were their norms? How did they structure their days? How did they organize their homes? What I’ve learned is that our current system of misalignment in the US is not inevitable or unique. Previous generations and other cultures grappled with versions of this same tension. This realization is, perversely, exciting. There is relief in knowing our problems are not special.
Despite our collective drooling over their parental leave policies, the US is never going to become Sweden. Multigenerational households aren't coming back wholesale. But other models don't need to be replicable to be useful: they're permission structures, proving things can be different, which is the first thing we must believe in order to change them.
We will write about these topics, but not everything we write about will be about women, work and family directly. Some of what we explore will be about the ideas and qualities that help us move through hard structural moments - qualities like awe, grit and striving.
Despite a varied landscape of topics, the connective tissue is optimism. There is so much we can learn and so much we can do better and we are so lucky for that to be true.
Lastly, I feel compelled to note that I’m a curious reader with a point of view, not a formal researcher. That means the reading tends to follow the ideas, not always the other way around. I will take care not to make sweeping generalizations, and I’ll always cite my sources.
More to come!
1 https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/childcare-costs.html
2 https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/12/education-does-not-resolve-gender-wage-gap.html
