The Critical Piece Missing From The American Jobs Plan

Against all odds, and to this writer’s satisfied surprise, 2020’s big sleeper story—the pandemic exodus of women from the workforce by the millions—has finally hit mainstream conversation. There’s a lot that you can chalk that up to, but we can at last actually discuss pressing national issues and consider the best response to them.

To that end, here comes the present administration’s American Jobs Plan. Designed to combat the pandemic economic fallout and its concomitant collapse of the job market, which are both still ongoing by degrees, it has the potential to reverse the staggering loss of employment women have faced over the last thirteen months. It almost reads like a Christmas list, full of ambitious proposals that women’s advocates have been pushing since the Bush administration: investment in care infrastructure, in education, in women-run businesses, and in affordable housing.