The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America
View the recording of this lecture on the Coffee Hour Kaltura channel.
About the talk
Drawing on interviews with one hundred men and women who have lost jobs across Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske examines the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt. Damaske demonstrates that commonly held views of unemployment are either incomplete or just plain wrong. The unemployment system generates new inequalities that cast uncertainties on the search for work and on life chances beyond the world of work, threatening opportunity in America. Damaske reveals the high levels of blame that women who have lost jobs place on themselves, leading them to put their families’ needs above their own, sacrifice their health, and take on more tasks inside the home. This “guilt gap” illustrates how unemployment all too often exacerbates existing differences between men and women. Class privilege, too, gives some an advantage, while leaving others at the mercy of an underfunded unemployment system. Middle-class men are generally able to create the time and space to search for good work, but many others are bogged down by the challenges of poverty-level unemployment benefits and family pressures and fall further behind.
About the speaker
Dr. Sarah Damaske is an associate professor of sociology and labor and employment relations at Pennsylvania State University, where she serves as the Associate Director of the Population Research Institute. Dr. Damaske is the Vice President of the international organization, the Work-Family Researchers Network. An internationally known expert on employment and inequality, Dr. Damaske is the author of three books, including The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America published by Princeton University Press in May 2021, The Science and Art of Interviewing (Oxford University Press, 2020), and For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Recently, she has published on the relationship between men’s earnings over their lives and their health at middle-age, how work and family experiences shape women’s experience of stress, on women’s work trajectories, and on how class and gender shape job searches during unemployment in The American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, and Gender & Society. Support for her research has been provided by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Work-Family Research Network. Dr. Damaske’s research is regularly cited in the media, including multiple stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR, as well as featured stories in the Wall Street Journal, ABC Nightly News, and the BBC.
Suggested reading
- Damaske, Sarah. 2020. “Job Loss and Attempts to Return to Work: Complicating Inequalities across Gender and Class.” Gender & Society 34(1):7–30. doi: 10.1177/0891243219869381.
- Damaske, Sarah. n.d. “Gender, Family, and Healthcare during Unemployment: Healthcare Seeking, Healthcare Work, and Self-Sacrifice.” Journal of Marriage and Family. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12801.