Now that the gender gap in unemployment has disappeared and male-heavy industries are seeing signs of life, we can finally put the buzzword to rest.

If you were one of the unfortunate few who watched ABC's failed wannabe-Tootsie comedy Work It, you wouldn't have known that the mancession has actually ended. But in fact last Friday's jobs report marked the end of the trend (and hopefully the persistent portmanteau).

Before we can declare it over, let's review what it actually was. The term itself was coined by AEI scholar Mark Perry. He was the first to give a name to a striking phenomenon during the recession (officially from 2007-2009): not only did employment tank in male-heavy industries, and not only did they therefore have elevated unemployment rates, but the gap between their unemployment rate and women's was the largest in post-War record-keeping. This was particularly striking because before the recession -- in the months from 2004 to 2007 -- unemployment rates were about equal for the two sexes, and women's even rose higher than men's for some months. This gap between the two rates hit a peak in August of 2009 at 2.7 percent -- men at that point had an 11 percent jobless rate, and women had 8.3. (The gap started closing after that point even as male unemployment rose -- women just started catching up with them in the unemployment department.) To sum up, as Perry puts it, "the impact of job losses was considerably greater for men, since almost 6 million men lost their jobs, compared to only 2.64 million job losses for women. More than two out of every three jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 were held by men (68.5%), or alternatively it was also the case that 217 men lost their jobs for every 100 women who became unemployed in 2008 and 2009."

He points out that much of this was related to the industries most affected by the recession. Construction and manufacturing went into freefall. He calculates that the largest job losses during the recession were in manufacturing -- down by 14 percent -- and construction -- down by 20.2 percent. Men make up 71.2 and 87.5 percent of those industries, respectively. On the other hand, some industries where women dominate were doing well. Education and health services was up 4 percent, 74 percent female, and government jobs were up 2.25 percent, 57 percent female.

Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

So that's what Work It was trying to channel: this notion that the economy had so changed that the only job prospects are in female-dominated industries. Where are we now? It turns out the recovery period, officially from 2009 until now (even if it hasn't really felt like one), has created a very different world. While recovery should mean a good bump in jobs for men if they lost so many in the recession, women have surprisingly lost ground. Their unemployment rate has been rising as men's has been falling, in many ways because government jobs are now the ones to suffer overwhelmingly.

But there was still a gender gap in unemployment -- that is, until Friday. Analysis by the National Women's Law Center shows that men and women are now on par for unemployment rates, both standing at 7.7 percent. Mark it: the gender gap that had Perry, the media, and manhood so worried has completely evaporated.

On top of that, the supposedly recession proof, female-dominated industries are not faring as well. And the male dominated ones are starting to show signs of life. Construction is up 2.1 percent; manufacturing is up 2. Yet government jobs are down 1.2 percent, and that's across the board -- 1.5 percent at the federal level, 1.4 at state level, and 1.1 at the local level. Those government job losses are driving our current womancession. Job losses, which skewed male, have now turned into skewed job gains. Men had lost 6 million jobs to women's 2.64 million during the recession, but now women have gained just eight percent of the 1.9 million jobs added in the recovery.

This painful economic period, even if it's showing signs of improvement, is likely far from over. Men and women are both still hurting in huge numbers. But at least one thing has changed: we can stop calling this a mancession.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

Instead of spending the money to train new teachers, we could focus on putting laid off teachers back to work and keeping them there by paying them better.

News came out today that President Obama is announcing a new plan to spend $100 million on training 100,000 new teachers over the next decade. Responding to a call from American businesses to provide more high-skilled workers, Obama's plan will focus on training more STEM teachers -- aka those teaching science, technology, engineering, and math.

Spending more money on education is a healthy priority, but is this the right tactic? The plan seems to presuppose that there is a dearth of teachers right now. Yet the opposite is true -- we've been laying them off in droves in response to tight state and local budgets. So there is a whole pool of people that we could put back to work doing what they already want to do. The number of jobs in "local government education" -- in other words, elementary school teachers -- has been falling steadily since February 2008, according to the BLS. We've lost 217,900 of those jobs since then, and things aren't getting much better, even with seemingly good signs in the latest jobs report. Those education jobs were down 9.6 percent since December.

So rather than enticing and training a new army of teachers, perhaps we could start by putting the ones we've already got back to work. It would likely be a lighter lift to retrain them. And it would help ease the ongoing womancession.

Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

But this plan also misses a larger problem: that we lose teaching talent because we don't value the profession enough. If you're educated in STEM, which some report pays 87 percent higher than the average private sector job, why would you go into teaching, an under-paid and under-appreciated field?

This is a serious problem for our education system. A report from McGraw-Hill lays out some recommendations on how the U.S. can take on the fact that its butt is being kicked on global test scores. The numbers are pretty embarrassing: on average, American students came in 15th in reading, 19th in science, and 27th in math. So what was the report's number one recommendation for changing those figures? Raise the status of the teaching profession. The report notes that the countries with the top scores are also those that typically pay teachers better. In fact, our high school teachers work longer than other countries, yet we spend less on teacher salaries than the average OECD country. This is a big reason that nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, according to a 2005 NEA report. Their reasons for leaving were poor pay and poor working conditions.

I applaud the idea of spending $100 million on education, particularly in a "recovery" period still taking a heavy toll on those working in that sector. But there may be much better uses for the money, and in all reality we need a much larger sum to make real change in our education system. We do need to recruit more people to the teaching profession. If we help people stay in those jobs by firstly employing them and then paying them what they deserve, we may take care of the problem.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

It used to be that white men had steady employment and all the government protection that came with it while minorities and women were stuck with precarious jobs. Now we're all vulnerable.

Malcolm Harris has a New Inquiry essay on the movie Sleeping Beauty (2011) and the feminization of precarious labor. A lot has been written on precarious labor recently, including both John Schmitt's book review in Dissent and Bhaskar Sunkara's critical response. I want to elaborate on this, since looking at gender and precarious work leads to an examination of a favorite topic -- the relationship between pity-charity liberalism and unconditional, universal programs related to economic security. A perfect example is how labor in the New Deal was treated differently by gender. The wedge between the two groups illuminates the difficulty in bringing economic justice to the 21st century. Precarious, vulnerable work was once relegated solely to women, but in this day and age more and more of us will fall into that category.

For Harris, the precarious worker is "indebted, insecure, vulnerable." If the classic notion of a worker "relies on having a bargaining place at the table with the boss," then precarious workers aren't workers (even though all they do is work or try to cobble work together).

How is the work gendered? Harris focuses on gendered affect: "passivity and her eagerness to please, her vulnerability and blank demeanor would look incredibly strange on a young man. Her willingness to keep treading water without the promise of anything better to come, her ability to communicate nonthreateningly and stay quiet at the right times are parts of what Nina Power describes in the chapter 'The Feminization of Labor.'"

But there's an institutional way to think about how the precarious nature of gender and work is both reflected in and amplified by governmental regulatory regimes, and how the future looks bleak in terms of bending those regimes toward just ends. Suzanne Mettler's Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (1998) is useful for this conversation. (Mettler, a political scientist and recent author of The Submerged State, is a favorite around here -- I, II, -- and recently joined our think-tank neighbors at the Century Foundation as a fellow.)

To set up the problem, Seth Ackerman has recently discussed universal programs in the context of the Tea Party's war against the state:

...[I]t’s indisputable that Tea Partiers make some kind of conceptual distinction between universal programs like Social Security and Medicare and other government programs. But this says less about the Tea Party than it does about universal social programs. It is easy for liberals to point to the Tea Partiers and call them bigots because they make a distinction between 'people on welfare' and 'normal people.' But in fact it’s the state that made the distinction first. When the state operates a means-tested or other conditional program, it inspects each citizen and stamps him or her as belonging to one category or the other... Political scientists have long known that something almost alchemical happens to public opinion when a universal, as opposed to a mean-tested, welfare program is established.

Mettler argues that this distinction comes out of the dual administrative nature of the New Deal. Part of the New Deal was to be administered by newly created federal government programs, while another part was to be administered by local and state authorities. It just so happened that the federal government's role regulated the work and lives of white men, while the state and local role retained authority over women and minorites. Keeping part of the New Deal's welfare state and floor of economic security administered at the state and local level was predicated intellectually on Brandeis' notion of the states as laboratories of democracy and politically on getting Southern white supremacists to endorse the New Deal. This meant that how people realize economic freedom could be maintained and expanded through illiberal means.

Remember that just three years after the Lochner case, with a Supreme Court hostile to all economic regulations, it made an exception to maximum hours regulations for women. Why? In 1908, the Court ruled in Muller v. Oregon, "That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious...as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race." These are the terms on which economic regulation could exist -- protecting essentialist visions of a women's place.

Mettler argues that "programs geared toward men became nationally administered programs and those aimed toward women retained state-level authority." This welfare state led to citizens becoming "divided by gender between two different sovereignties that govern in very different ways." As she says:

Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

What it meant to be an "American citizen" meant very different things to the retired male breadwinner, who came to expect his monthly social security check from the national government, and to the poor mother who hoped that the social worker assigned to evaluate her eligibility for a meager welfare check would find her child-rearing and housekeeping efforts worthy. The first was treated with dignity and respect, as an entitled person; the latter, with suspicion and scrutiny.

Mettler maps out a 2X2 grid, dividing out New Deal programs:

The crucial point is that liberal inclusion was based on long-term, full-time work for a single employer. If you had a job along those lines --and these jobs were held by white men at that time -- then you were included in a regime of universal economic security. Short-term, part-time work for multiple employers -- work done by women and minorities -- falls through the cracks into a patchwork of state and local governance. That governance bases inclusion on hierarchical ideals invoking republican notions of where a person stood in his or her community. The notion of the "deserving poor" comes out of this relationship. Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), for instance, was predicated on single mothers being able to retain their "natural" work as housewives and child-raisers. ADC's spot inspections of single mothers for "male callers" gives you a sense of how this played out -- as Mettler notes, "officials monitored and regulated women's moral character."

Progress was made on these New Deal programs up through the 1970s. But there's been significant rollback over the past 30 years. The call to "means-test" social insurance programs, Ending Welfare as We Know It by block-granting welfare's administrative role back to the states, the battles over block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Social Security and Medicare -- all have shifted the momentum in the opposite direction. But where does this leave us now, especially in regard to precarious labor?

I asked Dorian Warren, Columbia political scientist, Roosevelt Institute Fellow, and union expert, about where this stands. As he puts it:

Add up the Mettler argument with Hacker's notion of "policy drift," and most New Deal social policies (especially the FLSA and the NLRA) are outdated and obsolete. They were crafted with assumptions about work and the nature of the economy in mind: an agricultural and industrial economy, where workers had long-term attachments to one employer. That's no longer the case, and labor and employment laws haven't caught up to the new employment relationship. Long story short, we don't have the adequate legal structures to deal with this new employment environment.

The battle to move the welfare state to the federal level, where it could be administered inclusively and universally, was an intellectual and political battle waged within the New Deal. How is this playing out in the Obama administration? I'll eventually build a full case against the "nudge" theory of the administrative state, but for now a theory of using subtle and unconscious government techniques to help people work better within "choice architectures" isn't up to the challenge of recreating a regulatory environment for a new age.

For insight into how the current administration's approach is playing out in this model, take a look at the administration of health care reform. I asked Richard Kirsch, recent author of Fighting for Our Health and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, about the federal/local administration of health care reform. He responded:

The House bill set up a strong federal exchange and let the states do their own only if their exchanges had stronger consumer protections. However with the Senate bill -- the law we have now -- states can set up very weak exchanges. And the insurance industry has lots of clout at the state level. The best hope is that there will be a strong federal exchange for states that don’t set up their own. But that will only be true if HHS creates one.

So we have an outdated regulatory regime, an intellectual climate geared towards local, illiberal control, and the application of economic freedoms designed to keep women yoked to essentialist and moralistic discoures. A "polarizing" workforce means that the labor market, without significant reform, will take on an exaggerated version of the split we saw in the New Deal, with the precarious work falling into a patchwork administration system of moralizing and without opportunities to organize.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

By telling the story of post-War America's prosperity in the State of the Union, President Obama highlights a path we should take today: forceful government action.

In his annual State of the Union Address, President Obama spoke of the generation of Americans who "triumphed over a depression and fascism" to build "the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known." He made reference to his grandfather, a veteran of World War II, who returned from combat and went college on the G.I. Bill. He also referenced his grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line as "part of a workforce that turned out the best products on earth." Together, he went on, they lived with "the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement."

This story is typical of the millions of Americans who struggled through the twin crises of the 1930s and 40s, when the United States was transformed from a country brought to its knees by fear and economic paralysis to the single most powerful nation on the planet. But contrary to popular myth, this transformation -- which included the birth of the modern middle class -- did not take place by accident or miraculously emerge as the result of the initiative of millions of "rugged individualists." It came about because, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, the American government pursued policies that directly benefited working Americans.

The G.I. Bill is an excellent example of this. Under its terms, returning veterans did not just receive a better shot at a job thanks to tax credits offered to companies which might hire them, but a host of concrete benefits. They included full tuition, books, and living expense payments for those veterans wishing to pursue a higher education; support for vocational training; guaranteed unemployment insurance; and low interest loans for the purchase of a home, small business, or farm. The impact of the G.I Bill on postwar America was enormous. Within the next seven years, for example, approximately 8 million veterans would take advantage of its education benefits. As a result, millions of Americans who might never have dreamed of going to college were able to do so; and millions more would enhance their earning power and job prospects through the vocational training and other educational benefits the act provided.

And what of the president's grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line in Wichita? Again, there is much more to this tale than merely the story of a woman trying to help the war effort and make a living by working the night shift in a factory in Kansas. The president's grandmother was in fact part of one of the largest aviation projects in world history: the construction of the B-29 Superfortress. The B-29 was no ordinary aircraft. Aside from its enormous size, it was one of the most advanced aircraft of its day, with high performance engines, a pressurized cabin, an electronic fire control system, and remote-controlled machine gun turrets. To assist with its rapid development, the federal government poured over three billion dollars into the project. At its peak, the manufacture of the B-29 employed hundreds of thousands of workers in four major facilities, including the Wichita plant where 40,000 workers -- whose wages and benefits were secured through their union, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) -- churned out an average of four bombers a day. But even this is only part of the story. Overall, American aircraft production represented the single largest sector of the wartime economy, employing over two million workers, who turned out a staggering 125,000 aircraft at a cost of $45 billion -- roughly one fourth of the $183 billion the federal government spent on war production.

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Conservative critics of the New Deal are fond of saying that it did not work, that it was the Second World War, not Roosevelt's programs, that finally brought the Great Depression to a close. What they ignore is the fact that government spending in the Second World War represents one of the greatest federal stimulus packages in American history -- in essence, the New Deal on steroids. Nor will these same critics ever acknowledge that the postwar economic boom that followed, which built "the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known," came right on the heels of a period of massive government spending and borrowing. Federal expenditures accounted for no less than half of the country's Gross National Product during that period. Even more shocking, from the free market fundamentalists' point of view, is the fact both the war and postwar period of economic expansion came about at a time when union membership and wages were at an all time high.

So when the president calls on us to embrace the "American promise" -- that through hard work the average American can do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send his/her kids to college, and put a little away for retirement -- we should remember that it was not just "American values" that made this possible, but American law. It was the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, for example, that guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions that led the IAM drive to organize the aircraft industry and ultimately improve the wages and benefits of the B-29 workers in Kansas. It was the passage of the Social Security Act in the same year that provided a measure of support for working Americans' retirement and our first national unemployment insurance program. It was the G.I Bill that helped train the thousands of engineers, architects, technicians, and skilled workers needed to meet the demands of the expanding postwar economy. It was the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act and Securities and Exchange Act in 1933 and 34 that helped protect poor and middle class families from the vagaries and greed of the financial sector.

Taken together,  these measures transformed the basic structure of the American economy. American workers -- consumers in today's language -- did not have to go into debt to purchase the goods and services they desired. Rather, they earned a wage high enough to make it possible for them to contribute to the expansion of the economy. And with Social Security and the financial and banking sector properly regulated, these same workers could even invest a small portion of their income in the stock market or put aside a small amount of money to help pay for their children's education. It was this basic economic structure, backed not by socialism but by laws, meant to curb the excesses of unfettered capitalism, which provided the American people with the one thing they wanted more than anything else: economic security.

President Obama is right to demand that we need to return to an economy where "everyone gets a fair shot...everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules." But as we have learned at great cost, the forces of greed and avarice that brought on the Great Recession -- like the forces that brought on the Great Depression -- will not disappear of their own volition. If he really wants to meet the urgent need to restore a sense of balance to the American economy, put the millions of unemployed back to work, and provide a better future for our children, then he should intensify his demand that Congress act quickly and forcefully to do so. He might take counsel from FDR, who, in the darks days of 1932, observed:

The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach. We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.