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 workthat its a requirement for men and optional for womenloom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make mens unemployment an urgent problem, while womens unemploymentcocooned within a narrative of staying at homeis 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.