Who Will Our Country Support With The Economic Stimulus Package?
January 6, 2009
by Gretchen Glasscock
|Editor’s note: Beginning this month, The New Agenda Blog will be featuring regular columns from a diverse group of terrific contributors. Gretchen Glasscock is Founder and President of Advancing Women, an organization and web portal that supports equity for women and minorities in the workplace through career and financial parity. She’s also the editor of the Advancing Women Career & Biz Blog and a co-founder of The New Agenda.
A little less than a month ago, I wrote a blog post, How About A Stimulus Package For Women’s “Human Capital” Jobs?
I was inspired by a New York Times piece, Where Are the New Jobs for Women?, in which Linda R. Hirshman examines the Obama administration’s proposed stimulus package and women’s place in it, saying:
“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.”
She goes on to suggest that the stimulus package include infusions of funds for workers, like teachers, who build our human capital.
Now Katherine Franke has come along with an article, Stimulating Gender Equality, posted on the Feminist Law Professors blog and cross-posted from Columbia Law School’s Gender & Sexuality Law Blog, which takes Linda Hirshman to task for her position, stating that “the solution to gender-bias in the federal bailout isn’t to reinforce other gender asymmetries in the wage labor market. Sure, schools and hospitals should get ample amounts of funding in the stimulus package, but not because women work there, rather because our schools and hospitals are crumbling.”
She adds:
“The hard work we need to do RIGHT NOW is make it clear to the Obama Administration that a serious commitment to gender equality requires that they tie the funding of road construction, school rebuilding, development of green technologies – and even the financial services industry – to non-discrimination on the basis of sex and race, but also to data collection and reporting on who is getting the money. Who owns the companies that get stimulus funding, who gets hired by those companies, and what work they’re doing. Affirmative action has become a dirty word, but there are plenty of other means by which the work traditionally done by white men can be transformed into work that does not have a proper gender and racial identity. New apprenticeship programs for women and people of color who have been closed out of certain industries will be needed – particularly for those who are retooling themselves after having been laid off.”
Look, I agree with that, too. I say, why can’t we do both? Fund the workplaces where women are now….because they are vital to our future…..and move more women into the construction trades…. because there are good jobs there which will accomplish vital goals, as well.
Starting years ago, as part of the mission of AdvancingWomen.com to level the playing field, I was comparing wages and how fast you could rise in some of the non-traditional jobs compared to many types of low to mid-level white collar jobs. I used to travel to colleges, particularly community colleges, presenting on the relative ease of entry, better pay scales and opportunity to rise rapidly, in jobs like fork lift operator and helicopter pilot. I brought with me real women holding these jobs as living, breathing examples that this was a viable alternative to dead-end or low paying work.
Part of the change we need, at this moment, may be the stimulus package. But another part of it is that women must educate themselves and understand the opportunities out there. I guarantee that a master carpenter or a helicopter pilot will make more than most teachers. Not that they should, but they do. And this is reality we’re dealing with.
Let’s put Victorian, yesteryear thinking behind us, pull on those overalls, strap on our tool belt or our goggles and helmet and start making more money. Having more resources can be an integral part of having a greater say over our future, which is what, I think, most of us want.
I certainly agree with the author’s assertions and even if there were equity in these potential make-work jobs, said jobs end, then what? Our industrial base is eroded, seriously eroded. I recently viewed a clip of the world’s most sophisticated and one of the largest auto manufacturing plants in the world, a Ford plant in Brazil. Said plant is never going to miraculously ‘come home’ and provide thousands of high paying jobs for American women and men. Make-work, feel good jobs are just that, providing opportunity that is finite but does garnish votes.
Very interesting piece!
Educating women and their Mothers to the possibilities in these “male” jobs would help. My daughter wants to go to engineering college. Probably construction engineering. I have to bite my lips to keep from saying “Honey it is an all male atmosphere, do you want to be forced to try and organize a bunch of macho twits who resent white collar workers and think women are inferior? Pick something else!” But I am biting my lips because I feel she has the right to make her own choices and mistakes and she probably will be well paid for her efforts. I do not think these construction jobs really represent a good choice for women but I hope I am wrong.
Constance,
People will eventually get used to women in all jobs just like they have with doctors, lawyers, etc. The “pioneers” in any field do have to take it in the teeth. If she works in construction engineering most of her daily contact would be with a “less abrasive” crowd who are educated in business well enough to at least hide their sexism. Walking on the job sites the first few times is an interesting experience though.
I understand why the funding is going to construction jobs, because we need to rebuild infrastructure as if that is going to miraculously solve all of our economic problems.
If used and marketed properly, a stimulus focus on infrastructure and construction good been a tremendous catalyst for women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and match) that extends from actual jobs to academia (encouraging young women to aggressively pursue degrees in the STEM which is currently lacking).
If the new Labor Secretary, a women, is at the table and ensuring affirmative actions, goals and timetables are established for women for these jobs, the stimulus empowers her and women.
Watch for what role the Labor Secretary has in the stimulus package, will she be a bystander or an active player and decider.
Only people who did not read my article would write, as Franke has, that a major part of the argument is missing. “It would be great,” I argued IN THE ARTICLE, if there were more female engineers. I of all people have been one of the loudest voices in the country arguing that women should get, meaning make it their business to, and also get, meaning be allowed to, Work. Especially in jobs that pay a living wage, like engineering. Get to Work. Read my book.
The economic stimulus will start to pay out money in a MONTH. Efforts to get meaningful female participation in the construction trades through goals, timetables, training, pressure and everything else you can think of has been going on since I graduated college in 1966. The administration to come has a speechwriter who grabbed the breast of a statue of the Secretary of State, an all male stimulus program and an inaugural pastor who believes that women should not speak in church. If Professor Franke thinks that, after forty years of failed efforts, that administration is suddenly going to integrate the plumbing trades in the next month, in the next year, or, indeed, at all, then the view from her ivory tower is better than mine. And if she could integrate the ranks of engineers, then she’s a time traveler as well, because there simply are not enough female graduates of engineering programs to make the slightest statistical change in the composition of the jobs program. If the advocates of using the stimulus to integrate the building trades, I’m all for it, but the last thing women need right now is feminist law professor pipe dreams of an ideal world while a trillion dollars goes to every man in America, from Robert Rubin (tax writeoffs) to Joe, the, well, you know.
Indeed, the last thing feminism needs is for dreams of the best to be the enemy of the good. Professor Franke just criticized the only approach that has the slightest chance of making a real difference in the dollars in the pockets of women who don’t have, you know, tenure.
As author of the blog post, I’d like to thank Linda Hirshman for taking her time to comment. So I’d like to reply.
First, Linda, I’d like to say I love the way you write and I love the way you think. I couldn’t agree more with your original article. I also agree with concept of Franke’s article that it would be a positive step to get more women into the engineering and building trades. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I think we should try to get increased funding for both. As you mention, it has been a long, uphill battle. The barriers and stereotypes are ancient and systemic so change will be glacial and incremental. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep pushing for it, as our mothers and grandmothers did and our daughters will have to do also, in the future. But they stand on our shoulders. What I don’t agree with is quibbling among ourselves and particularly calling each other out in public. We are one movement with one goal, to advance women. The advances we make will be made to the extent that we’re united and willing to put it all on the line to move forward. And when I say putting it all on the line, I mean also putting aside small and ultimately insignificant differences over tactics and finding common ground to work together and support each other. We don’t have to agree on every detail of every other woman’s agenda to advance women as long as we’re moving in the same direction. We need to be watching each other’s backs, not sharpening our knives. There’s plenty of criticism to go around as we are all human and fall short of the mark, at times, but let’s not let that criticism come from us. We don’t want to be the “circular firing squad”. The last thing we need is to fight among ourselves when there is so much…out there…which is wrong and which we need to fight. We are not the enemy. We need to aim our fire over the barricade….and with all due respect to both you and Franke, in my judgment.,that applies equally to both authors and both points of view.
A bit off topic, but not sure where to post this…
Some good news from the House regarding the Lily Ledbetter legislation and I think if you read the article, it highlights (among other things) that voting for women based solely on gender and nothing else can work against our interests:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....pay_equity
[...] of this, this, and this? That’s just the beginning; don’t forget Summers, Favreau, the Stimulus Plan. How much evidence does one need to mount to prove that Obama is out of touch with women and their [...]
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