President-elect Obama can get the economy moving again by advancing gender equity instead of reinforcing the wage gap between men and women, which particularly hurts poor women of color. Feminist historians, economists and writers agree that we should rebuild the nation's roads and bridges, make buildings energy efficient, and extend the information highway. But we also need to enhance the social infrastructure, bolstering not only a green economy but also the carework economy, by generating and improving pink jobs in home care, health and education.

The New Deal funded construction to put men back to work. At the time, its focus on the white male industrial worker and its assumption of a family wage (men bringing home the bacon and the stay-at-home wife frying it up) reinforced inequality by race and gender. To do the same today -- in a much more diverse nation, where women compose 46 percent of the labor force, the rates of single motherhood are far greater, and the very safety nets developed in the 1930s (Social Security, welfare and even the right to join a union) are unraveling -- would be a much greater mistake.

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