Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment

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 un...