First, let’s remember that Obama’s massive trillion dollar stimulus program was designed to help women, not men, even though men had a higher unemployment rate than women when it was enacted.
Christina Hoff Sommers explained it in the Weekly Standard.
Excerpt:
A “man-cession.” That’s what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
[…]The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”
[…]Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan. He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components to the proposal. And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, Joseph Biden’s chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create, but the gender composition of the various employment sectors and the division of largess between women and men.
Romer and Bernstein delivered “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” on January 10. They estimated that “the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent.” Lest anyone miss the point, they added that since women had held only 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, the stimulus package now “skews job creation somewhat towards women.”
But in the lower quintiles, women can do a lot better for themselves and their children by getting married before having children. The second income makes a big difference. But what if men’s incomes go down, and their unemployment rate goes up?
The left-leaning Atlantic explains how it works.
Excerpt:
The good news, trumpeted in Women’s Work,the latest report from the Pew Economic Mobility Project, is that dramatic increases in women’s labor-force participation have boosted the “financial security and mobility” of millions of families across America since 1970. The bad news is that growing economic opportunities for women have not translated into more family income for poor and working-class families at the lower end of the income ladder.
[…]What accounts for the paradox that women’s income is rising across the board yet family income is falling for the bottom 40 percent of families? Mainly, to paraphrase [feminist] Hanna Rosin, the end of marriage and men in working-class and poor communities across the nation, coupled with the fact that maternal labor-force participation has plateaued since the 1990s. That is, a dramatic retreat from marriage, declines in men’s employment and income, and a leveling off of maternal labor-force participation have all combined to limit the income available to lower-income families, and to offset the increases in women’s income documented in this new report.
[…]One reason that lower-income families are losing economic ground is that gains in women’s income have been offset by declines in marriage among the poor and working class. As the figure below indicates, more than half of these families are headed by just one parent—typically a single mother. Lacking the income of two parents, or the income of a father, these single-parent families are much less likely to reap the benefits of increases in income that have accrued to today’s working women.
[…]Another major factor holding back families financially in the bottom 40 percent are declines in men’s income. Consistent with Rosin’s thesis, which argues that many men in the United States are seeing their economic fortunes erode, the graph below indicates that men’s personal income has fallen across most groups, but particularly among working-class and poor men. So, one more reason that family income has declined for poor and working-class families is that husbands and boyfriends have less dough to put on the table than they once did. This is particularly important because, even today, as the Pew report notes, men’s wage rates in couple-headed families are almost “twice as important as those of their female partners for boosting family income.”
So if you want to help poor women, here are two things that you should do. First, you should help men get better educations so they can get good-paying jobs, even at the low end of the job market. Second, we should be encouraging women to marry in order to get that second income (or only income, if it’s high enough) in order to help make ends meet. Unfortunately, the Democrats are opposed to both.
WINTERY KNIGHT 