Got To WorkHow the Obama jobs program will really affect women workers.

Slate.com

By Linda Hirshman

Looks like the Obama administration is finally remembering who most of its voters were: women. During the early rollout of the Obama jobs program, all the talk was of roads, bridges, and alternative fuel. And as many people quickly noticed, that plan might as well have had the old boys' club sign posted to it: NO GIRLS ALLOWED. Who builds roads and bridges and invents alternative fuels? Construction workers and engineers. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the construction trades are approximately 3 percent female and 97 percent male, while engineers are 12 percent female and 88 percent male.

Since the start of the recession, the unemployment rate for women is up by 1.6 percentage points. That is not as dramatic an increase as men's unemployment (up 2.8 percentage points), but it's clear that women's unemployment went up by a factor far greater than 10 percent of the men's rate, while they would have captured only 10 percent of the jobs, as they were originally described. So in the recession-suffering Olympics, it would have seemed that women were entitled to a little more than 10 percent of the job ointment.

Without ever letting on, of course, the no-drama Obama mantra suddenly began to shift on the stimulus package to include talk of new jobs also going to places where women can sometimes be found, such as "education" and "health care." Then last Saturday, the president- and vice-president-elect's chief economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, released a report on the program, titled "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," which includes an analysis of the effect of the jobs program on women. The report said almost nothing about any other group.

According to Romer and Bernstein, the jobs program as now conceived will be a veritable estrogen-fest:

The total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42% of the jobs created by the package. Given that so far in the recession women have accounted for roughly 20% of the decline in payroll employment, this calculation could reflect that the stimulus package skews job creation somewhat toward women, possibly as a result of the investments in healthcare, education, and state fiscal relief.

The rest at: http://www.slate.com/id/2208521/