I'd like my gender bailout now, please

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, December 5, 2008 - 1:48 PM Share

I think it would be safe to describe the November job report as "not good."

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

Since every other sector of the economy is asking for federal assistance, I'm wondering if this Boston Globe story by Robert Gavin will prompt the male gender to ask for special assistance:

Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. Some 1.1 million fewer men are working in the United States than there were a year ago, according to the Labor Department. By contrast, 12,000 more women are working. This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs. "As the recession broadens, the gap between men and women is going to close somewhat," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "But right now, the sectors that are really getting pounded are intensely male." The divide is far starker than it was in last recession, when the technology crash battered professional and technical sectors in which women now hold more than 40 percent of jobs. From the beginning of 2001 to the beginning of 2002, the number of employed men declined by about 900,000, while the population of women with jobs fell by about 700,000.

In semi-seriousness, one wonders if this kind of gender breakdown will lead to a skew in infrastructure spending towards male-dominated industries (like road construction) rather than female-friendly infrastructure sectors (like, say, expanding broadband capabilities or boosting education spending).

EXPLORE:ECONOMICS, POLITICS, FINANCIAL, GENDER

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ERIC (THE ECON DUNCE)

10:12 PM ET

December 5, 2008

If money is just some weird

If money is just some weird kind of polite fiction imagined to be worth something, isn't debt? Can't we all just go into national or global hypnotherapy and re-imagine ourselves to be all happy and debt free?

Better yet, it's all just a couple of numbers in some financial databases. Just do a "search and replace" to remove a couple of zeros of debt here and there, and presto! Problem is fixed!

I mean given the scale of these bailouts, aren't we just playing with imaginary quantities and imaginary value anyway?

ALDOUS

10:33 PM ET

December 5, 2008

"In semi-seriousness, one

"In semi-seriousness, one wonders if this kind of gender breakdown will lead to a skew in infrastructure spending towards male-dominated industries (like road construction) rather than female-friendly infrastructure sectors (like, say, expanding broadband capabilities or boosting education spending)."

This is actually more than semi-serious. There's been some speculation (like in today's Post) that now would be a great time to spend the inevitable stimulus money on a progressive agenda. As the Post columnist writes: "Already, there is grumbling that Obama shouldn't try to do anything special with the stimulus; only old-fashioned programs need apply. The critics are grousing: How dare Obama try to use the crisis to transform the country!"

But actually, by investing in gender-balanced (you say "female-friendly") infrastructure areas, the administration will have the opportunity to further improve the economic position of women in this country, and in the long term to improve their social position. The move from industrial to post-industrial is, as you imply, gendered. More economic power for women could translate into closer-to-equal status culturally.

So whether the administration has a "male" or "neutral" stimulus focus is a big deal. Your tongue-in-cheek post raises a serious issue, one on which progressives and conservatives would disagree sharply.

JACK

12:08 AM ET

December 8, 2008

The architect design index,

The architect design index, whose birth was in Y1995 is at its lowest. Before this downturn, finding INFRASTRUCTURE engineers was becoming a daunting task. This dull and boring field does not attract newcomers. Even with current downturn, part of $ 1T stimulus allocated to infrastructure spending will not have sufficient personnel to do the design work. A lot of design work will go overseas and not benefit Americans out of work.

Also the construction field also does not attract Americans, other than those who have been doing this for at least a decade. It is very hard work and will mainly benefit Amnesty candidates.

BENQUO

1:29 AM ET

December 10, 2008

@Eric: What about the

@Eric:

What about the pension funds and banks and shippers and everyone else who depend on a smoothly working credit market? What do you propose to do with them?

Shall we let the old folks starve in order to write down mortgage balances? Wreck traders and merchants who extend credit in order to make Citi look better?

Remember, a debt to one party is an asset to another -- and if you don't balance things perfectly, you'll increase some people's net indebtedness by writing down some debts and not others.