Sasza Lohrey

Thank you so much for joining us today, Arielle.

Arielle Kuperberg 

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sasza Lohrey 

So to begin, I would love you to give our listeners a bit of context surrounding the work you do examining recent social change, particularly from the 60s to present day, and the different ways in which that has manifested itself culturally, socially, in our relationships, and to give us a high level view of some of the trends and patterns that you guys have found in your research.

Arielle Kuperberg 

Yeah, so a lot of my research focuses on how things changed as women, especially in the 60s started entering higher education and larger numbers started entering the labor force in higher numbers and we see this throughout the 60s and 70s and this leads to all sorts of lasting changes in family in gender relations in economics. So that’s the starting point for my research. So I’ve looked at things like as women entered graduate schools, how has their childbearing patterns changed, as marriage became less of an economic necessity for women? We see, for instance, a rise in premarital cohabitation. So some of my recent research has looked at how has premarital cohabitation, like why did it rise? And how did the type of people who premarital cohabited changed over time, and then my research on more recent periods, looks at things like college hookups, right, so we see all sorts of social changes in the late 20th century so people start getting married at later and later ages. Part of that is tied to going to college. So women are going to college, they get married at a later age, maybe they live together more, but we also see a rise of hookup culture. So a lot of my research recently has looked at college hookup culture, who’s participating in it, who’s more likely to take risks? I’ve looked at things like sexual identities. And then my most recent research is looking at student loans and how that’s impacting families.

Sasza Lohrey  

Starting with the The first thing you mentioned, with more women entering grad school than entering the workplace and how that began to change the structure of family. I’d love to hear how you know going back those 6070 years, we could relate it to today and what can be learned about the world we’re living in today.

Arielle Kuperberg  

A lot of things have changed in terms of paid work, right women are more educated now women are more educated than men. Women are more likely to have a bachelor’s degree. Women are more likely to go to many different types of graduate school you hear a lot about, you know, women aren’t in STEM. But if you look at overall graduate school attendance, we have more women than men. So we have big differences in education, labor force participation. So in terms of work, women are still a little under what men are. So women are still more likely to be leaving the workforce to become a stay at home mom, women are much more likely than men to be stay at home parents that hasn’t changed. Women are still more likely to do the majority of housework, the majority of childcare. So we’ve seen a big shift in roles outside the home, but less of a shift in roles inside the home. That’s not to say things haven’t changed at all. So men today are much more involved as fathers than they were in the 60s. If you look at how much time men are spending On childcare and housework, their time has doubled compared to fathers in the 60s, but women’s hours have stayed the same, sometimes even increased a little bit in terms of childcare. So to some extent that we’ve been stalled in some ways since the 1990s, where women made this big push into the workforce, they started getting a lot of opportunities in the workforce, they were able to enter into many professions they weren’t able to enter into before. But it’s breaching a limit in part because there’s still inequality in the home. One thing I think that’s really interesting with what’s happening now with COVID-19 is hearing about how housework and working from home is playing out and that women are still in many cases responsible for the homeschooling now. So in that respect, things have not really changed.

Sasza Lohrey  

You mentioned your research on stay at home parents, how has it become more or less Less stigmatized for women and for men. How has it changed

Arielle Kuperberg  

basically from the 1980s through around 2016, during that time period stay at home fathers have become much more common than they were before. So in the 1980s, it’s like 1%. Now it’s like 5% of dads are at home with their kids. But there hasn’t been a huge drop in the number of stay at home mothers. And still about a third of mothers are stay at home mothers. Basically, we’ve seen a lot of increase, but it’s still from one to 5% whereas women are still around like 30 to 33%. And this is only among parents of young children. There has been a lot of progress was project I’m working on that we’re presenting this summer looks at both trends and media rhetoric around stay at home dads, and as you mentioned, stigma that was a very common theme we’re looking at like newspaper articles about Stay at home dads and what are they saying? Man almost half mentioned people being stigmatize people being rejected by other moms. There was one person who someone thought I was like a pedophile because I took my child to the park. And they were like, why are you hanging around this park? Like, yeah, that wasn’t one of our news articles. I think there is still stigma bringing things back to current events. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens now. Because one thing that happened during the Great Recession 10 years ago, is a lot of fathers became kind of temporary stay at home dads, while they were laid off, and now we’re seeing another situation where a lot of people are being laid off. We know during the Great Recession, men were laid off at a higher rate than women. So we saw this bigger increase and stay at home dads. So it’ll be interesting to see. Sociologists will be studying what happens in the next year or two, probably for the rest of our lives. 

Sasza Lohrey  

Wow, that’s so interesting. I think most people have been wondering, okay, how will things change will life go back to the way it was, but the fact that there will be sociologists and historians studying this for decades, decades, however long to come is something that hadn’t quite made it onto my radar and he’s so interesting. Speaking of while everybody is at home and many people who are perhaps unexpectedly cohabitating you research cohabitation within the context of long term couples and how it influences their likelihood to stay together or get divorced. This research is really interesting because as one of the articles I read mentioned, science had for a long time, associated a toxic for marriage warning label surrounding it. cohabitating before marriage, and there were all these studies and statistics that showed if you live together before you got married, you were more likely to get divorced. And I remember going back years and years having heard that statistic, and I found it a bit bizarre, but never really thought how to question it. So I’d love you to just tell us a bit about your process and how you decided to question that statistic which you ended up overturning.

Arielle Kuperberg  

that originally started as part of my dissertation. And I do kind of like to look at my real life for inspiration. So I will say that the same month I was defending my dissertation proposal, I moved in with my husband before we got married, as we had been getting into the serious relationship and talking about moving in together. And at the same time, I was studying for my family exams in grad school and reading all the research. It didn’t really make sense to me. The field said that cohabitation causes divorce. And why is that? Well, part of it is the type of people who live together are more likely to divorce. And I find that to be true too. So that’s not that living together causes you to get divorced. But that if you have less money, you’re more likely to live together. People who have less money are more likely to divorce. So we already knew some of that, but that still didn’t explain all of this association between living together and divorce. So the theory when that when you live together, you get used to this idea that you could leave at any time. And so when you get married, you bring that over, and that really did not make sense to me. And then another thing I noticed while I was studying for these exams is there was this older literature talking about age, and the age at which you get married and how getting married at a younger age. means you’re more likely to divorce. People who get married at younger ages, they’re less prepared to take on the roles of marriage. They’re not established yet in their careers. This builds a shaky Foundation, which could lead to divorce. I kind of I don’t know exactly how I got this idea. But to me, those things kind of go together. And one thing about cohabitation is that people who live together that happens before you get married, and tends to happen at a younger age. So I was like, well, maybe that accounts for why they are finding this higher divorce rate. Maybe it’s that they’re forming their relationships later. And if you look at this literature, it’s because they’re taking on the roles of marriage at too young an age. Well, if you live together, well, you’re taking on the roles, like what roles are you not taking on? You’re living in the same household, you’re sharing your life together, you may have children at a higher rate than if you weren’t living together. So it turns out when you account for the agent marriage, this app A few other things. So altogether, that kind of explains the impact of divorce. So it’s not that living together somehow taints your relationship. It’s that settling down with a person when you’re too young, can lead to divorce. And people who are living together first are settling down on average at a little bit of a younger age. And if you compare them to people and married around the same age, they have about the same divorce rate.

Sasza Lohrey  

You mentioned the part about commitment. And in one of our more recent interviews with Nick Epley, he really dove into that a bit. And the fact that whether we commit fully to something or not, has a huge capacity to influence the outcome.

Arielle Kuperberg 

So first of all, I think it is true that cohabitation does have less commitment. So if you look at just living together, the breakup rate for cohabitation is much higher than for marriage. But what I’m more skeptical about is when you enter marriage, does that not make a difference? So Part of the reason marriage does make a difference is there is this symbolic commitment. Marriage is a public commitment, where you’re saying to your family and friends, I am committing to this person other things that marriage is used to come with, like more financial security for women, they don’t really come with that anymore or not automatically. So some of the other things that marriages used to change about your life that made you more likely to stick together have kind of gone by the wayside, like economic dependence. So what’s left that is the difference between cohabitation and marriage is that commitment that you’re making that public commitment is a symbolic commitment, but it’s also a legal commitment. It makes it legally harder for you to break up with the person. There are also many legal changes that happen when you get married. And as a result, marriages are much less likely to break up than cohabitation. 

Sasza Lohrey 

Getting into, you know, the most important part about it’s actually moving in together. Earlier or marrying earlier, moving in together, or getting married at the age of 18 saw a 60% rate of divorce. Whereas compared to individuals who waited until 23, which is still extremely young,

Arielle Kuperberg 

it’s below average.

Sasza Lohrey 

it was already cut in half to 30%. I was wondering if there is a quote unquote magic number at the age at which you are most likely to stay together if you wait until that time to move in together or to get married, what the advisable age that would be considered setting yourself up for success.

Arielle Kuperberg 

My research found that plateau effect after around 23 or 24, basically, so at very young ages, they’re like 18 to 23 said there’s that huge drop. Well think about what’s happening for many people between 18 and 23 they are moving out of their parents house, they are deciding, are they going to college, if they go to college, they’re completing college, they’re settling on a career. All of these things are huge changes, and they can lead to huge incompatibilities with somebody if you get married to that person at 18. So you get married at 18. And you’re like, Okay, this is my plan for life, but you may change, they may change when I was 18, I thought I was gonna grow up and be a housewife, which is the opposite of what I grew up to me. And then the other thing is, especially in today’s economy, if you have a college degree, a lot of so called middle class jobs, jobs that come with good benefits and pay require you to move after college. Well, going back to what we said about gender and you know, many more dual career couples, especially before they have kids. Well, now if one person gets a great job in California and the other person gets a great job in New York, Right after graduation, whose job are you gonna pick? Maybe you decide to have a commuter marriage for a while, maybe you pick one or the other. And then that leads to resentments, which could lead to divorce later on. I think that big drop part of it is emotional maturity and just development, but part of it is also these big life changes and these big life goals that get decided on in that 18 to 23 year old period, then though, by the time you’re 23, people are in, you know, maybe they’ve moved to the city that they’re going to move to and they can meet somebody there, and that person already has a job there. So they’re going to end up being more compatible long term as they form their relationship. Now, divorce risk goes up a little bit in the 30s. And that’s what we call in science, the selection effect, which is that if you are not settled down with someone by the time you’re in your Mid 30s. It’s not that there’s something wrong with you. But there’s a higher percentage of people who may not be good at relationships. And that’s why they didn’t settle down until they were 32. And then that may lead to higher divorce rates later on what it could be, too is that people might begin to lower their standard. Yes. Perhaps it could be a different factor in there as well. Yeah, there’s also this idea that maybe people get kind of set in their ways. And then they’re used to living alone, which can lead to problems when they now have to share households which if you spent 15 years living by yourself, maybe that’ll lead to more problems. And if you’re moving from your parents house, you lived on your own with roommates for a few years, and then he moved in with a partner. You’re less used to living on your own.

Sasza Lohrey  

In this research, I came across the statistic, that cohabitation has increased by almost 900% over the last 50 years, who were the people who are most likely to cohabitate?

Arielle Kuperberg

If you look at the first people to move in together, what my research shows is, first of all, it’s a lot of people of color people who traditionally had been disenfranchised from things like traditional marriage, legal marriage. In the 60s, there are many states where you couldn’t even have an interracial marriage legally. And the other group that lived together early on were counterculture, hippies, 67, or 68 was a Summer of Love. And one of the things I say in this article, look at the history of cohabitation is there was this couple that moved in together after spending the summer in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, went back to New York moved in together without being married, and there was a huge New York Times article about it in 1968, which ended up turning into money. Nationwide scandal called the LeClaire affair. It was a young woman from Barnard College named Linda LeClaire and a young man from Columbia University named Peter bar moved in together. And one of the things I talked about is after this article came out, living together became a trend among the celebrities of the late 60s. And they would have these articles about these young hipsters equivalent, celebrities living with their partners. If you look at the history to up until the 1930s, we had this thing called common law marriage in the United States, where if you live together, you can like call yourself husband and wife and now you’re legally married. And in the 1930s, that was kind of done away with a state by state level 1923 1930s. And part of the argument there was for a more civilized country now you should be able to get a legal marriage We shouldn’t just have this this was like the folk way of getting married. But part of it was also this argument that this is something that people of color did at a higher rate. And there were racial arguments used as common law marriages were done away with this early group was the people who would have had a common law marriage. Well, now the law changed, and they don’t have a common law marriage. So it’s a cohabitation. But then that celebrity kind of as that LeClaire affair happened, as many celebrities in the next couple of years, started living together, we saw a huge increases. So I say there’s a 900% increase. That’s because less than 10% of marriages in the 1960s started with cohabitation. Then in the 70s, it’s skyrocketing. 70s and 80s. By the 90s, early 2000s. We’re now up to about 70% of first marriages. Now start with cohabitation. Increasingly what we’ve seen especially since the 1980s Is that there is increasing income and education gaps between people who live together before marriage and people who don’t live together before marriage. It’s basically people who are putting off a wedding until they could save the money to have a nice ceremony. Since social norms have changed, that you can live together without being married. You can have kids without being married. They’re putting off the actual wedding until later when maybe they can save some money or maybe pay off some debt or something like that.

Sasza Lohrey

In the research, there is a term that you guys use this concept of sliding into marriage and I kind of just loved the verbiage sliding not deciding and how it says that sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be that much of an issue if it weren’t difficult to get out of which it is. And there’s this quote From an article that says it’s like signing up for a credit card with zero percent interest. At the end of 12 months when the interest goes up to 23%, you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s called consumer lock in just talking about how founding relationships on convenience or ambiguity can interfere with the process of actually identifying if it’s the right relationship.

Arielle Kuperberg 

We talked about the theory that living together makes you used to the idea of leaving, and then you’d leave later. So that was one theory for why cohabitation increased divorce. And then sliding versus deciding was another theory, also talking about why cohabitation might lead to increased divorce rates, which said that some people they move in much more easily than they would have married they don’t think about it very clearly. They’re like, Oh, my rents up. We’re basically spending every night together anyway, so I may as well move in here. Whereas getting engaged and getting married would have more thought to it. And then once you are living together, it’s much harder to break up than if you weren’t living together. Because now you have shared rent, you may start getting pets together, maybe you have kids. So the more you go the life together, the harder it is to leave. So that means some people may get married, who if they hadn’t moved in, as early as they did, would have broken up. I think that’s the explanation for why cohabitation doesn’t lower your divorce rate. These are like two different competing factors. One is for me living together was a very deliberate part of the process of getting married and it was a deliberate step. Or in that kind of scenario. Living together can show you that you don’t actually want to marry that person. Then you break up before you ever get married and you’re not counted in the divorce statistics. I think these are like two competing factors that are working against each other one is that it gets harder to break up when you move in together. So that may propel some people who wouldn’t have gotten married. Like let’s say, in a alternate reality, you can’t live together before marriage for some reason. So now this couple, if they I would have had to have wait to live together until marriage, maybe they would have broken up, but because they moved in, they kind of slide into marriage, but then later they find out they’re incompatible and then they get divorced. I’m on the other side. So that’s kind of one scenario. On the other side, you have the couple that would have gotten married and then quickly divorced if they had no cohabitation. But now because of cohabitation, they realize they’re incompatible and they split before getting married. These are both happening, and they’re counteracting each other to some extent. If one of only One of those things would happen. Maybe cohabitation with lower divorce. So that’s what we call the weeding effect weeds out the bad marriages before they happen. But there’s also the sliding effect. Once you move in, it’s going to be harder to break up and there’s going to be more normative pressure. And there’s this kind of norm that like, Okay, you’ve been living together, like, why, you know, once you move in together, it’s considered kind of like a step on the way to marriage for most. It’s not like, oh, we’re going to move in together and then that’s it. That’s the end. We’re gonna be here for the next 30 years. Both of those things are happening and cancelling each other out to some extent. So that’s why we see cohabitation doesn’t lower your divorce rate, it doesn’t increase it.

Sasza Lohrey 

Right and really paying attention to the way we’re viewing that move in with another person not necessarily viewing it as, okay, we’re getting married. That’s what this means, but also not seeing it. As a way to concede and postpone commitment, if somebody is putting pressure on to move to the next step, not just doing it to make them happy, but making it a conscious decision, and as you’ve mentioned this way to test the relationship, but in a way where we still are consciously recognizing whether it’s working or not, and not just sliding into marriage or allowing it to happen, because of inertia, yeah, but really using it as a way to get to know the person in a new way to better understand the relationship and test it for lack of a better word, and make the decision rather than just letting them happen.

Arielle Kuperberg  

Yeah, it’s not really testing that it’s also many people use that as a time to save up money or pay down debts or get it themselves and kind of legal order to be able to have a legal marriage and wedding that they want to have.

Sasza Lohrey 

As we were talking a bit about this Summer of Love in 1967, and the way that became a catalyst for this cohabitation movement, which now is, whatever 900 fold or 10, tenfold? How did that same Summer of Love, perhaps start? social changes in another area that you’ve studied? And that being surrounding hookup culture? You know, be it on college campuses or, you know, in everyday life, but how did that start to shape perhaps, that the perspectives that we have and the culture that we live in today in regards to those themes.

Arielle Kuperberg 

it all ties in together, right.

Sasza Lohrey

All the Summer of Love.

Arielle Kuperberg  

another thing that’s happening in the 60s which kind of led to this Summer of Love was the rise of the birth control pill, the birth control pill wasn’t approved by the FDA until 1960. It wasn’t until the late 60s that doctors would prescribe it to single women before they would prescribe it to married women who had had all the kids they wanted. That was the first people who were able to get it. And then they lowered the age of adulthood in 1971 to 18. So that means that all the 18 to 21 year olds who couldn’t get a prescription for birth control because they were considered a child, and they would have to get basically like their parents permission. They were suddenly able to get birth control pills to we see these legal changes, social changes, technological changes, and that’s part of what enables the Summer of Love to even become a thing is all these people having access to reliable birth control for the first time up until then, they had condoms. They may have had the diaphragm This made it Much easier for people to hook up and have casual sex without consequences. Now that’s not to say that people in the 1950s didn’t have casual sex, but during the 1950s if you got pregnant, you’re gonna get rushed into kind of a shotgun marriage in the 60s now they get access to birth control 1971 that gets expanded to younger people. 1972 abortion is legalized in Roe versus Wade, which also expands access to control over pregnancy. And this leads to hookup culture is in multiple ways. So first is the direct like, okay, you can have casual sex more if you have access to reliable birth control and abortion, that makes the potential cost much lower. The second thing this does is because people are able to have control over when they’re having kids is that more women start going to college, more women start going to grad school, which is how we started this whole podcast. So part That is because it used to be until 1978. If you got pregnant until then you could legally get fired for being pregnant, and most women work. And it wasn’t until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act at that point they said you cannot be fired for getting pregnant. All these things, you could control your pregnancy. Now you also can’t get fired for being pregnant. That helps to up until then you could get fired for the second you got pregnant. So am I going to go and get a PhD and take six years to get into a career of being a professor? Am I going to invest all that time when three years after I started my job, I had my kid and I’m gonna get fired. Probably not. We see as women have more control over the timing of their pregnancies. This huge increase in the 60s and 70s in education for women and higher education. So college education and graduate education, as women are investing in their careers. Before the 60s colleges were more dominated by men. Now they’re much more CoEd, many more people are going to college. There was also in the 60s there was a big influx of men going to college because of the Vietnam War. That was a way to not get drafted was to hide out in college. So we saw an expression of men. So now we see young men and women going to college. When you go to college, you’re putting off having kids putting off getting married. Well, what are you doing in the meanwhile, now, okay, social norms are changing around sexuality. There was a huge 60s and 70s expansion of sexuality, more group parties more dating, but then aids epidemics happening not nobody’s quite sure what’s going on. Eventually it comes out that it’s sexually transmitted, so people get a lot more cautious. But then now you these people kind of get a handle on the AIDS epidemic. We also saw some cultural changes in the 90s. related to women’s sexualities there was more of this cultural shift, where this idea that women enjoy sex too, and that it’s okay for women to enjoy sex. At that point, people had figured out what was going on with HIV AIDS and there was a big push to wear condoms, but there was more kind of a secure feeling of Okay, this is kind of under control. And we see this big explosion of hookup culture really in the 1990s that continues to this day where people start there, you know, they’re going to college for longer. They don’t know what their career is. They don’t know what the future is holding. They may not have time to settle down, they may not want to settle down because of all the reasons we said why settling down at a young age may lead to divorce, but they don’t know what’s happening to their career. They don’t know how they’re going to change, but they still have a sexual wants and needs. They still want companionship and hookups is one of the ways to get that. So they’re not necessarily now going to college thinking like this is where if I meet this person, they’re going to be my future husband. And that’s not to say that dating is dead or that people don’t form relationships. I mean, my research has shown people are still as likely to go on dates, people are still commonly forming long term relationships while they’re in college. But there’s also now this kind of third alternative, which is the casual hookup which has arisen and fulfilled a new area in society. It has this new need of people who are looking for sexual companionship, but for whatever reason, are not looking for a long term relationship.

Sasza Lohrey  

there obviously are ways in which things have become more liberal, more open, less gender stereotyped, but I’m curious amidst all of that change all of those those patterns, what underlying things from the past stereotypes or values or gender norms might have carried over a bit more than we realize.

Arielle Kuperberg 

Okay, one of the reasons I think cohabitation has gone up so much premarital cohabitation is because of this persistent idea that men should be earning more money in a relationship that you should marry up. You should be marrying someone who at least has the level of education you have, if not more, if you’re a woman that is and that you should be married someone who earns at least as much money as you if not more, and I think one of the reasons we see cohabitation going up is because men are less able to fulfill that idea. Women are now more educated than men, men, they still do earn more money, right that that’s still persisting but you If you look within couples now about 40% of couples, women are earning more than men. So we see women’s work roles changing, but then there’s a lag in terms of who’s earning more money, women are still much more likely to be stay at home mothers, women are much more likely if you’re moving for somebody’s job in a relationship, women are much more likely to move for the man’s job than the man is to move for the woman’s job. Women are still when you have kids, they take on more of the childcare. If your kid is sick and somebody has to stay home from school, women are assumed to be the one who’s going to take the day off that has impacted some of these things like cohabitation and hookups is partially because men are less able to fulfill this idea that men should be earning more that idea kind of persist for whatever reason. So that’s kind of holding back some people from getting married who I think would otherwise get married if those gender ideas were different. One of the studies I’ve worked on looked at whether you’ve dated hooked up or had a relationship in college. And then there were also these questions like, I wish I had more opportunities to hook up, I wish I had more opportunities to date or have a long term relationship in college. And what we found was that men were much less likely to have had a long term relationship, but they were more likely than women to say that they wish there were opportunities for relationships. And if you look at if you looked at compared to dating and hooking up actually, the thing that most people like the most common answer, like what did you actually want more opportunities for it was relationships for both men and women. Um, and I think what’s happening there is that especially college men, there’s this idea that if you’re going to form a relationship, get better be with someone who’s stable, who has money to take you out, maybe who has a car to pick you up, has a job. What do men in college have? They are usually earning negative money when they’re taking on student debt every year. So they don’t have job stability. There’s also still ideas about men should be the older one in the relationship. Women should be the younger one. Well, when you’re in college, if you’re a man who you’re forming a relationship with, you can’t form it with high school students. That’s illegal or looked down upon in many cases. So that leaves men in college with with actually less opportunities to form relationships to there’s still a lot of persistent gender ideas within relationships. And these bleed out into other things like work. There’s the idea that the man earns more than the woman. Okay, well, then 10 years later, and we just had our first kid and we have to decide who’s going to be a stay at home parent. Well, the husband earns more because that’s how we dated and sorted ourselves when we were dating. So now of course, it makes sense for the woman to be a stay at home mom because she earns less money. These things that still persist in these very early stages of relationships and hookups and dates, and affect whether we could form relationships at these early ages and who we’re forming relationships with, then are having these long lasting effects on gender inequality throughout people’s lifetimes. And then the other thing I think that’s interesting about hookups in particular, is, in some ways that kind of challenges these traditional gender ideas, because a lot of these traditional gender ideas come out in the traditional date. If you look at first dates, one thing that’s really common is for the man to be expected to pay. It used to be like men automatically paid. Now, it’s like the woman offers to pay but the man should turn her down kind of thing. But that goes back to this idea that men should be the breadwinner. But that’s indeed whereas hookups one of the differences between a hookup and a date is that for a date, you’re leaving your home. And usually spending money on something. So there has to be a conversation about who is spending money. Whereas in a hookup, you’re not going out of the house, you’re not spending money. In some ways. These are up ending traditional gender ideas. 

Sasza Lohrey  

And I think, well, you’re not generally spending money on a hookup even something such as the stereotype of who has the condoms has changed for a long time that was seen similar to on a date if the man pays you that sort of thing, where I think women almost didn’t feel comfortable or had a different stigma to condoms or having condoms on you when you went out. And so I feel something even as small as that is a pattern that I think has changed. I wanted to go back to the 40% number you gave 40% of relationships have the woman being the breadwinner, and just reiterate That because I think even in today’s society where it seems as though we’ve made so much progress, and the mentality has changed so much, I really think that we are living behind that statistic and the way we talk about things and deal with things, and particularly with the systemic things such as you mentioned, you know, if the child is sick, who will stay home and I know a lot of times I’ve heard stories where the school will repeatedly call the woman, and if she doesn’t pick up, they don’t call the man if the child is sick to notify him. And maybe the woman is at work, maybe the man is too but maybe he’s not even at work or, you know, somebody wants tell me they had specifically told the school that she would be in meetings and they were to call the man and they did not do that. We’re just trying to change the framework in our mentality to more appropriately reflect that 40% statistic. So just A reminder that we should never be looking just at the surface and the statistics, but the influential factors underlying all of them. And how much is a feedback of our behavior versus culture shaping it? In regards to all of these things. 

Arielle Kuperberg 

Yeah.

Sasza Lohrey  

Well, we look forward to hearing how more of your research unfolds, how the influences consequences, and perhaps social changes that come as a result of the pandemic unfold. And, as always, only time will tell. So thank you so much for your time. And joining us to share your work with us. And we look forward to continuing the conversation. Until next time.

Arielle Kuperberg  

Thank you.