Veronique, add Christina Hoff Sommers’s latest, “No Country for Burly Men,” to the growing pile of evidence that the stimulus package had nothing to do with creating jobs and everything to do with stimulating the interest groups that helped Obama get elected. The salient facts Sommers highlights:

* Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men.
* Last November, President Obama proposed a stimulus plan that emphasized “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects with lots of money going to sectors like construction and manufacturing.
* A consortium of feminist groups complained that the stimulus was skewed toward creating jobs for men and launched a lobbying effort to add more spending on sectors like health care and education where women predominate.
* Obama complied, so much so that the now-infamous Jan. 10th report on the stimulus (the one with the way-off projections of how the stimulus package would affect the unemployment rate) concluded that the stimulus bill “skews job creation somewhat towards women.”

The feminist groups were delighted with the results. Sommers writes:

… It is now four months since the bill was signed into law. A recent Associated Press story reports: “Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.” A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services. According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments, “We all talked about ’shovel-ready’ since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that’s not the case.” At the same time, the Labor Department’s latest (June 5) employment report shows unemployment rates of 8 percent for women and 10.5 percent for men. “Unprecedented” is what Harvard economist Greg Mankiw called the new 2.5 percentage-point gender gap. “It’s the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS [Labor Department] data back to 1948,” said Mark Perry.
There is great room for debate over the effectiveness of government stimulus programs, and over how much impact a focused “shovel-ready” spending program would have achieved by now. What is not debatable is that changes in the American economy and workforce are favoring service sectors where women are abundant and that the current severe contraction is centered on sectors where men, especially working-class men, predominate. That an emergency economic recovery program should be designed with gender in mind is itself remarkable. That, in current circumstances, it should be designed to “skew” employment further towards women is disturbing and ominous.

The stimulus package was “skewed” to shower money on Democratic interest groups and constituencies in order to secure their support (or at least mute their opposition) for Obama’s more controversial proposals. “Job creation” was always incidental to that broader goal.