It is true, unfortunately, that the United States needs its roads and bridges rebuilt before any more disasters befall families just trying to get from one side of a river to another.  But it is equally true that infants and toddlers need care and nurturing; children’s hearts and minds need to be developed in schools so they can become responsible and innovative adults who can create and contribute to a green economy, while, at the same time, having the good sense to maintain their roads and bridges.

In the NYTimes.com piece, Where Are the New Jobs for Women? , Linda R. Hirshman examines the Obama administration’s proposed stimulus package and women’s place in it:

“BARACK OBAMA has announced a plan to stimulate the economy by creating 2.5 million jobs over the next two years…but there are almost no women on this road to recovery.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

It turns out that green jobs are almost entirely male as well, especially in the alternative energy area…Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants).

Obama’s Campaign Promised Jobs Which Include Women

Women are teachers, and the campaign promised to provide support for families with children up to the age of 5, increase Head Start financing and quadruple the money spent on Early Head Start to include a quarter-million infants and toddlers. Special education, including arts education, is heavily female as well. Mr. Obama promised to increase financing for arts education and for the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports many school programs.

.. Mr. Obama also promised that the first part of his plan to combat urban poverty would be to replicate a nonprofit organization in New York called the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country. The group, which works to improve the quality of life for children and families in the Harlem neighborhood, employs several hundred people in full- and part-time jobs. By making good on this promise, Mr. Obama could create thousands of jobs for women in social work, teaching and child care.

Women represent almost half the work force — not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children’s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.”

It is unfortunate that this blind spot about women is so ancient and systemic that many, and certainly those in Obama’s job stimulus planning team, seem to be unaware of it. Ive mentioned before that during the Clinton administration, I went to a conference at the White House where the focus was about creating work for women in the Americas.  The consensus was that if you want to help a country, help the women in it. The result of that thinking was that, through training and micro-loans, a woman who was ebabled to buy an industrial strength sewing machine, grew her tiny business into a small factory that employed most of a village. That is only one of countless stories of what women in remote Latin American villages achieved with some intelligent intervention and support.

Women, in fact, have the drive and ability to change the entire social and economic ecosystem around them, if given some support.  Let us hope that Obama’s team recognizes their oversight and has the political courage to reconfigure their job stimulus proposal accordingly.

Linda R. Hirshman, author of the NY Times article is also author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.”

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