The Stimulus Package and Gender Diversity

Judge Richard Posner of the University of Chicago has a follow-up book to his Failure of Capitalism. His recently published The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (2010) steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had fallen in the autumn of 2008 and the winter of 2009.

Posner has several interesting comments and observations regarding the stimulus package. He writes the following:

As the stimulus bill wended its way through Congress, the amount of money allotted to transportation infrastructure (mainly road and bridge construction, and repair and building projects such as painting schools) shrank, possibly because of political pressure: few women are employed in such projects. Yet that is the class of expenditures that comes closet to satisfy the conditions for an effective stimulus. It targets an industry, construction, in which the unemployment rate is very high; most of the projects financed by it can be started quickly if a determined effort is made to cut red tape at the risk of inviting more than the usual amount of corruption and waste in public contracting; and there is an economic need, unrelated to the depression, for improvements in the nation’s dilapidated transportation infrastructure, so that the projects are likely to have value independent of their contribution to digging the nation out of is economic hole. At the opposite extreme are projects, such as the allotment of $17 billion to facilitating the digitization of medical records, that will be staffed by highly paid technical workers, most of whom have no difficulty holding or finding good jobs (especially in the medical industry, which has not been affected by the current depression), and that will not be completed until long after the depression ends. Moreover, no effort was made to concentrate public works spending in areas of the country in which unemployment is high.

The truly interesting comment is “. . . possibly of political pressure: few women are employed in such projects.” He has a good point - - what happens in a world where the balance of power is becoming 50% male and 50% female? A 50/50 balance in the educational (more women attend college than men), the managerial, the economic, and the political (The Economist recently referred to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “. . . the most powerful women in American history, there have been female governors, secretaries of state and Supreme Court justices, but only one female speaker.”) will have a profound impact on the social, economic, and political structures in the United States and the world. What happens to a 90/10 industry, such as construction and engineering, in a 50/50 world? One possibility is rather clear - - you get left out. Fixing our 90/10 ratio may be our most pressing social and industry problem. It may also be our greatest opportunity.