Women, the Recession, and the Stimulus Package

...There were 8.5 million unemployed men and 6.7 million unemployed women in July of this year...

...This agenda for equality remains to be completed...

...only 5 percent of families with children are single-father families...

...For example, in the spring of 2007, in a survey of American workers sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and analyzed by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, nearly one-third of women reported worrying about their personal economic security compared with only one-fifth of men...

...By 2005, the subprime market had grown to 24 percent of all home-related loans...

...Heidi Hartmann is an economist and the founder and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank in Washington, D.C...

...growth is based on a knowledge economy, on a well-educated work force that contributes value to goods and services sold...

...Women, especially women of color, took out a disproportionate share of mortgage loans at subprime rates...

...The higher their incomes, the greater was the disparity between minority women and white men...

...Women benefit disproportionately from the dollars spent on Medicaid, Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), while men receive more of the unemployment benefit dollars...

...In considering where feminism has become most institutionalized, higher education stands out among other social institutions (for example, business...

...Not only did women receive few of the jobs created by the New Deal, some working women were pushed out of their jobs in favor of men...

...toward the states to prevent layoffs in areas like public safety, education, and health care...

...At its eighteenth annual summer conference, economists from Europe and Latin America as well as the United States shared information about their efforts to develop and promote gender-sensitive responses to the worldwide financial crisis...

...Unemployed workers include many more people than those recently laid off...

...Women will probably not get a large share of the infrastructure jobs, because at this writing in late summer, there are no directives from the federal government about how federal and state agencies should ensure that women and other disadvantaged workers get training and jobs at good pay...

...it falls gradually thereafter, never falling as low as men’s rate, and rises dramatically again at older ages...

...Men’s unemployment is considerably higher than women’s in this recession...

...During November and December, as I spoke with members of various stimulus planning teams, most of whom were having trouble finding enough “shovel ready” projects to meet their spending quotas, they repeatedly stressed that the package would also include substantial dollars directed toward “relief”—aid to the unemployed, the poor, and so on...

...While people were afraid and hesitant—after all, the stock market had crashed, Lehman Brothers had folded and not been bailed out, Iceland was going under, and everyone wondered how many banks would fail—expert understanding of the size of the problem lagged behind reality...

...These numbers are a more accurate measure of the burden of unemployment...

...How Does the Crisis Affect Women...

...or government, where women are stalled at 17 percent representation in the U.S...

...and toward tax cuts, making good on an Obama campaign promise...

...For the cohort aged eighteen to twenty-four, who are in the early childbearing years, the poverty rate climbs even higher...

...Men’s employment is clearly more cyclically sensitive than women’s...

...it was a bold move...

...They feared women would not get their fair share of jobs and that critical human needs would be overlooked...

...As rates on many of these loans reset at higher values, and as unemployment rises, we can expect the number of families who lose their homes to grow...

...The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses two different data sources to measure employment and unemployment...

...They include new entrants to the labor market such as recent high school and college graduates and those reentering the labor market after a period of absence such as women returning to work after childbirth...

...Some groups of women have especially high rates: 12.6 percent of single mothers, for example, are unemployed compared with 10.5 percent of all men and 8.1 percent of all women...

...Women’s higher poverty rates are the result of their lower lifetime earnings, from both lower hourly wages and fewer hours of work, and their single status, both in the childbearing years and in old age, when they typically outlive men...

...10 percent of male...

...Despite the obvious greater economic vulnerability of women, this recession has been characterized as a men’s recession or a “mancession,” as conservative commentator Christina Hoff Sommers referred to it, writing recently in the Weekly Standard (June 29/July 6, 2009...

...in a single year, the package amounts to about 3 percent of GDP...

...Nor were Congresswomen able to get a provision in the law to that effect...

...The effect of high interest rates, as home prices fell and jobs disappeared, was, of course, multiplied foreclosures...

...The relief funds would also provide an immediate stimulus, and in fact have the highest multipliers of any government spending—every dollar spent on food assistance, for example, results in 73 percent more spending further down the line...

...religion...

...While most of these families will find places to live, by moving in with other family members or switching to rental housing, family hardship will surely increase...

...First, feminist scholars have the knowledge and resources to intervene...

...If the administration’s employment projections are accurate, women will get their fair share of jobs...

...In fact, because of the high proportion of single-mother families, the average child in the United States today is just as likely to be living with a working mom as a working dad...

...Women, the Recession, and the Stimulus Package HEIDI HARTMANN Last winter, as Barack Obama’s transition team developed a stimulus package to jumpstart the U.S economy, feminist economists and historians organized petitions, e-mails, and meetings to call attention to women’s needs...

...It is better than in Europe, which has been hindered by fear of taking on too much debt, but could be even larger...

...Figure 3 also shows employment-topopulation ratios (which exclude the unemployed), and these ratios clearly reveal the impact of recessionary periods (shown as shaded) on men’s and women’s employment...

...Women not only become the primary wage earners for families (despite their generally lower earnings), but also still do the majority of housework and family care as well...

...Money directed at education and health care expenditures by the states will disproportionately employ women...

...This caregiving increases their economic vulnerability not only when their children are young, but also in old age when retirement benefits are typically based on their reduced lifetime earnings...

...One other significant government report came out of the process...

...And, if women lose their jobs, the family will suffer nearly as much as if the man does...

...Figure 3 provides a longer view of women’s and men’s labor force participation across the past thirty years (labor force participation is the proportion of women, or men, working or looking for work out of all women, or men, in a particular age range...

...The ratio of employment to population for women fell much less in the recessions, and, given the continuing growth in population, the absolute number of women employed did not fall in the three earlier recessions (women’s long-term labor force growth canceled out the negative effects of the recessions...

...the other is a survey of households that asks individuals about their work and job search experiences and is used to estimate the number of unemployed and the unemployment rate (the number of unemployed divided by the number in the labor force, including both those working and looking for work...

...Men’s time spent on housework or family care does not increase much when they become unemployed...

...Yet the bottom line is that women experience more poverty than men do across all age groups...

...On January 10, 2009, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, economists on Obama’s transition team, released a report estimating the employment impact of the proposed stimulus package (Romer now serves as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and Bernstein serves as Vice President Joseph Biden’s chief economic adviser...

...Figure 1, which displays Current Population Survey data for 2007, shows high rates of poverty for girls and boys (but slightly higher for girls) and a steadily declining rate of poverty for men as they age, with men aged sixty-five and older having the lowest poverty rates...

...But the president clearly wants to ensure that future U.S...

...Nevertheless, the media focused on the “shovel-ready” physical infrastructure jobs, and most of the Obama team messaging seemed to focus on those as well...

...Even before the current downturn, longer and deeper than any recession since the Second World War, women reported more economic hardship and greater feelings of economic insecurity than did men...

...30 million for the Small Business Administration’s microloan program...

...And despite the enormous economic progress women have made since then, they are still more vulnerable than men...

...A few will be able to renegotiate their loans with lenders, with the aid of Obama administration programs, but many will not...

...Mothers were 50 percent more likely to report not buying something their child needed (32 percent of mothers compared with 21 percent of fathers...

...Although feminists wrote op-eds and letters to the editor, there were no press conferences or ads in the New York Times, as there had been during the longer welfare reform campaign...

...Violence Against Women Grants, $225 million...

...During the same period, men’s labor force participation has gradually decreased, reflecting an increasingly wealthy society in which workers can stay in school longer, retire earlier, or interrupt their work for a variety of reasons...

...Contrary to Sommers’ rant, they will not get more than their fair share...

...For women, the story is dramatically different...

...that it eliminate artificial barriers to achievement such as discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender...

...As Figure 2 shows, the unemployment rate for men has increased even more steeply than that for women, whereas in the most recent prior recession, the growth in women’s and men’s unemployment rates was similar...

...Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), $500 million...

...As a labor economist, I am most often struck by the gains women have made in the labor market—they are working more and more consistently, preparing themselves through education and training for lifelong participation, and earning more per hour and over their lifetimes than previous generations...

...8 percent of female), whereas more women work in education and health services (35 percent of female workers vs...

...Their activism was unprecedented...

...The flip side of women’s long march toward labor force participation is that now, when married couples lose male earnings, the woman’s earnings will be relied upon to support the family...

...In each of the five recessions that have occurred since 1979, men’s employment as a share of the population fell substantially...

...Several programs of special interest to women received funds: child care and Head Start, $4 billion...

...Feminist historians were motivated by their knowledge of the 1930s and the way women were excluded from many government programs...

...The payroll data show that men have lost 78 percent of the total jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007—this is the figure that Sommers and others use to characterize this recession as a men’s recession...

...Feminist economists argue that economic policy must address these differences...

...In contrast, the household data show that women constitute 41 percent of all unemployed workers, just slightly below their share of the labor force (at 47 percent...

...This focus led feminist scholars to stress the need for human infrastructure, for greater spending on neighborhood centers, health centers, child care, home health care, and so on...

...In December 2008, a group of progressive economists circulated a petition calling for $500 billion in stimulus spending because they had heard that the Obama team was talking about less...

...Until recently, then, women’s employment growth has been largely impervious to recessions...

...Perhaps the activities of feminist scholars and activists had the most effect on these programs targeted at women, since the larger components of the package were in place early on...

...Women’s needs were thus explicitly taken into account in the design of the stimulus package...

...The number of jobs to be created was estimated separately for women and men...

...It shows women’s labor force participation generally increasing as women have “voted with their feet,” moving out of the home and into the labor market as they have increased their education and training...

...Ironically, these data would not be available by gender if the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, IWPR, which I head, had not led a campaign to reinstate the data after the BLS had discontinued it in 2006...

...While it bears some resemblance to the work of academic women around welfare reform in the early 1990s, this mobilization was more spontaneous, more rapid, and probably less visible to the public...

...Women and men have different economic roles and work in different locations in the economy...

...December, January, and beyond all saw huge monthly losses in payroll jobs...

...More than half of women worried about cutbacks in Social Security compared with 30 percent of men...

...So far in this recession, which has not yet hit bottom, women’s employment has fallen by 1,121,000...

...Families are, of course, affected by anyone’s unemployment, man’s or woman’s...

...For example, in the United States, more men work in the manufacturing and construction industries (27 percent of male workers vs...

...I have not seen the like during all my time in the nation’s capital...

...that it ensure fair and equitable pay...

...Several developments may help to explain this success...

...Women, but not men, often take time out of the labor market to raise children and take care of family members...

...Clearly, lenders stand to profit when good risks take out mortgages at subprime rates, as may have happened with many middle-class people of color...

...To my knowledge, that is the first significant gender impact statement by a U.S government entity regarding policies to be implemented within the United States...

...The mobilization targeted the transition team, largely through e-mail petitions...

...20 million for technical assistance to women- and minority-owned businesses to help them get transportation infrastructure contracts...

...This requires that the United States increase its investment in human capital, in education and health care...

...In March 2009, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a seven-page report on how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests in women and children...

...Even without all the feminist activity, the Obama package would have done a lot for women, and it is impossible to know what the additional impact was...

...It is still rare for men to raise children alone...

...Arguably, though, this mobilization was more successful in its outcome...

...In this context we have to give the Obama team a lot of credit for being able to push through a sizeable stimulus package...

...Congress...

...Nevertheless, the pro-women aspects of the stimulus package are numerous...

...one is a survey of employers that provides information on payrolls and is used to estimate the number of jobs lost or gained each month...

...80 million for enforcement of worker protections, including equal employment opportunity...

...In terms of content, members of the Obama team argued that the stimulus should be timely, temporary, and targeted toward job creation, but also that it should be a down payment on the president’s priorities: improved education, health care, and energy efficiency...

...Unemployment for men was still less than 8 percent, and most of the macroeconomic models were not predicting a very long or very deep recession...

...But women are experiencing considerable job loss...

...As of July 2009, 10.5 percent of men aged 16 and older were unemployed compared with 8.1 percent of women in the same age range...

...As the Consumer Federation of America reported, among home purchasers in 2005 whose income was at least twice the area median income (in other words, middle class and above), African American women took out subprime loans at more than four times the rate of white males: 46 percent of African American women compared with 10 percent of white men with similar incomes...

...and that it make getting an education and working easier for parents through paid family leaves and subsidized child care...

...In the 2001 recession, women’s employment fell by 230,000, the first significant drop in employment for women in a recession...

...The U.S...

...And although economics as a discipline lags behind in mainstreaming feminist intellectual work, compared to disciplines such as history and literature, the International Association for Feminist Economics and its journal, Feminist Economics, are both well established...

...Does the package go far enough...

...Women and the Stimulus Package In terms of the size and timing of the stimulus package, government response has been good but not great...

...It also faded fairly quickly...

...package, at $787 billion, amounts to 6 percent of annual GDP, but the bulk of the spending will occur over two years...