Linda Hirshman has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which she warns that Barack Obama's stimulus plan should benefit both genders equally:
Mr. Obama compared his infrastructure plan to the Eisenhower-era construction of the Interstate System of highways. It brings back the Eisenhower era in a less appealing way as well: there are almost no women on this road to recovery.
Back before the feminist revolution brought women into the workplace in unprecedented numbers, this would have been more understandable. But today, women constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work (emphasis added).
There's a word to describe Hirshman's argument here. I think the word is "wrong," since
it's based on a faulty premise:
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.”
Click here for more background information on the data provided above.
Now, maybe this is unfair -- maybe more women have entered the labor force, and therefore their unemployment rate has risen as fast as men.
Nope, that's not it.
Monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Hirschman's assumpton is a flat-out falsehood. Immediately prior to the start of the recession (November 2007), the unemployment rate for men was 4.7%; the rate for women was 4.6%. As of November 2008, the unemployment rate for men has increased to 7.2%, while the unemployment rate for women has only risen to 6%.
So, to sum up: there is no way to spin this data to support the assumption that drives Hirschman's op-ed.
Readers are invited to proffer their reasons for a) how Hirshman could be so wrong in her premise; and b) why the
New York Times op-ed page did not fact-check this out of the essay.
UPDATE:
Hirshman provides her rationale for this assumption in a comment over at Megan McArdle's site:
Here is the data from the November report of the BLS, available to anyone with a click of the mouse, showing the female unemployment rate rising as the downturn worsened, and, coincidentally, the jobs stimulus rose to the top of the political pile as the salient issue.
Since extracting information from printed sources does not seem to be your strong suit, allow me to summarize the data:
From October to November 2008, men's and women's unemployment rate rose .2. From September, 2008 to November, 2008, which was when the downturn worsened, men's unemployment rate rose .4 and women's .6.
This is, at best, cherry-picking the data, because it ignores the massive gender splits of the eight months of the recession prior to September.
If the recession started in December of last year, I don't see a reason for looking only at a couple of months of data.
ANOTHER UPDATE:
Hirshman posts another comment below, which is essentially a reprint of what she wrote at McArdle's site.
My response:
- I misspelled her name in the initial version of this post. And my apologies for that.
- Again, her focus on this quarter's data misses the point that this recession has hit men far harder than women. Looking only at recent data without examining the whole of recession is like looking only at the gender breakdown of the last lifeboat off of the Titanic.
- Hirshman asks, "why is it that making an argument for women elicits this level of vitriol?" I don't find much vitriol in this post. I would counter with the question of why Hirshman -- someone who is hardly new to the public sphere -- is so sensitive to valid criticisms.
- Stepping back, there's a larger question, which is whether the stimulus package should take gender into account. To me, that's the wrong question. The right question is, how can the stimulus be apportioned to maximize productivity and employment gains?
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