First, I apologize if this has already been posted. I have not been a babble regular lately.
I received this from my roommate:
http://www.femst.ucsb.edu/projects/crwsj/feminist_historians.php
MORE THAN 1,000 AMERICAN HISTORIANS CALL FOR EQUITY
IN THE STIMULUS PACKAGE IN OPEN LETTER TO OBAMA
[The following is my own writing, I think the link is well-worth reading].
1000 or so American historians of the new deal are concerned that Obama's stimulus packages will be discriminatory. I imagine the same argument can be made to apply to Canada. There has been a media focus on physical infrastructure, aka airports and bridges and roads. These are male dominated industries. The writers point out that the social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc) is also crumbling, and that the social infrastructure has a much bigger relative impact on how women experience the economy.
My first thought is that this analysis seems so trivially obvious that I'm ashamed I had to read it written out by someone else rather than realize it on my own. My second thought was an incomplete one debating with myself whether or not they're "correct". They write: "Women today make up 46 percent of the labor force. Simple fairness requires creating that proportion of job opportunities for them." my previous frame of mind was to only think about the macroeconomic impacts of different projects, and now I see a sliding scale between the two priorities. I doubt it should be purely about equity as they imply. They cite the statistic that women composed 18% of those hired by New Deal projects, such an impact would yield undesirable social engineering ramifications.
They also mention racial equity, but they give it much less detail. I am not sure why that is, I would guess it is also very important and that there are also differences in profession among racial groups of the same gender.