“[This report] is long overdue,” said Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser and chairwoman of the White House Council on Women and Girls. “We understand that the success of women and girls is vital to winning the future.”

The report, titled Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being (PDF), is a collaborative effort of several federal departments prepared for the White House Council on Women and Girls. None of the data revealed in the report is new — and the most recently reported statistics are from 2009 or 2006 — but it is the first time such a report has been drafted since President John F. Kennedy commissioned one in 1963.

A lot of the information in the report is old news — for instance, women are still trailing men in economic earnings: At all education levels women earned 75 percent of what men make in 2009. But the report does add some interesting perspectives. For example, the jobs that women tend to go for and the majors they take in college, tend to be in humanities or social work, something Obama is hoping to change. Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank said in a phone conference Tuesday that the president will be encouraging young women to pursue the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Women currently make up 51 percent of the population; there are about 4 million more females than males in this country. And 57 percent of Americans over 65 are women. But though women still exceed men in life expectancy, they are likely to face more health problems and physical ailments down the road, particularly in the regions of mobility, obesity and depression; though figures point to a higher prevalence of heart disease and diabetes in men (14 percent of men 18 and older, compared with 10 percent of women).

About a quarter of women have reported arthritis and hypertension, with those figures increasing as women become seniors. And though less-educated women have reported higher rates of hypertension than more-educated women, among men, hypertension is not associated with education levels.

The report finds that women exercise less than men. Only about 41 percent of 25-year-old women said they participated in the federally recommended amount of aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercises, compared with more than half of 25-year-old men. And of all women, only 15 percent reported exercising the recommended amount. In 2009, about 25 percent of women said they ate fruits and vegetables five or more times a day. Almost one out of seven adult women smoked cigarettes every day.

Amid all the statistical figures one statement really stands out in summarizing women’s health:

“Women are almost 40 percent more likely than men to report difficulty walking.”

And that’s difficulty walking a quarter of a mile, or three city blocks. Walking trouble can point to arthritis, heart disease, pulmonary conditions, neurological conditions, near-blindness and other sensory limitations, and can “affect an individual’s ability to fully take part in all aspects of life,” according to the report.

And then, of course, there are different levels of walking difficulty among women, depending upon education and race:

• Women who did not complete high school (23 percent) were twice as likely to report difficulty walking than women who have had at least some college (11 percent).
• Non-Hispanic black women (18 percent) were more likely to report difficulty walking than Non-Hispanic white women (12 percent) and Hispanic women (11 percent).

From 'Women in America,' source National Center for Health Statistics

And even if the information is already out there, here are some, perhaps, surprising findings:

• In any two-week period, 8 percent of women and girls report experiencing clinically significant depression, compared with 5 percent for men and boys.
• Women make up two-thirds of graduates in the fields of humanities, arts, education, health and welfare but one-quarter of the graduates in science and technology.
• During the most recent recession, the unemployment rate among women over 20 rose from 4.4 percent to 7.7 percent; for men the unemployment rose from 4.4 to 9.9 percent.
• About 7 percent of women are severely obese. But 14 percent of non-Hispanic black women are obese, compared with 7 percent of Hispanics and 6 percent of white women.
• In 2008, intimate partners were responsible for 26 percent of all violence against women, compared with 5 percent of all violence against men. Of all Americans killed by an intimate partner, 70 percent were female, a percentage unchanged since 1993.
• The rate of rape against females over 12 (as defined by the National Crime Victimization Survey, which notes that between 2004 and 2008, police were not notified of nearly half of all rapes) declined by 60 percent between 1993 and 2000 and has remained at this level throughout the past decade.
• While male students are more likely to be victimized with weapons, female students are twice as likely to be electronically bullied as males.
• The number of women committing crimes is growing: Women made up 18 percent of all arrestees for violent felony offenses in 2008, up from 11 percent in 1990. The amount of women arrested for burglary or larceny grew from 25 to 35 percent.
• About 206,000 adult women were incarcerated in state or federal prisons or local jails in 2008.
• The number of women under community supervision or parole increased by 121 percent between 1990 and 2008: 1.1 million adult women were under community supervision on probation or parole in 2008.
• Homicide victims among black women dropped from 2,300 in 1993 to 1,200 in 2008. But for white women the figure remained steady during this same period of time at 2,200.

Officials stressed the point of the report is to draw a complete story of the American Woman, piecing everything we know about her to improve her well-being.

So what will the Obama administration be doing with this data? Should Americans expect to see new legislation, or at the very least, more discussion of women’s issues after Women’s History Month has turned into National Poetry Month?

Asked directly, Jarrett said: “[This report] will be a tool to help inform our policies and programs. Given the financial challenges, it is important we help spend our money wisely. … This report gives data that will help support that.”

As evidence to the president’s commitment to improving the “quality of life for women and girls,” Jarrett pointed out that Obama created the White House Council on Women and Girls. And look, they got a report — which Jarrett said the administration plans to help them “do more with less.”

What that means exactly remains to be seen, but Preeta Bansal, general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, was slightly less vague. She said Obama has made a vow to enact policies that are evidenced-based, and the same goes for this information on women. She said he will be looking at how well existing programs targeted at women — in the areas of health, education, unemployment, and violence — are working.

But it’s simply not good enough news given the magnitude of the unemployment crisis. About 8.4 million jobs were lost during the recession. The economy needs to gain 100,000 to 125,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth. The Wall Street Journal notes that this month’s job growth just isn’t fast enough: “The U.S. unemployment rate is unlikely to move much lower if job gains continue only at December’s pace. Even employment gains close to October’s pace (210,000 jobs) would take us into the next decade before seeing the unemployment rate back near 5%.”

The most troubling news is that the number of discouraged workers increased significantly from last year. The amount of discouraged workers — those unemployed but not looking for work within the past month — rose by 389,000 to 1.3 million from December 2009. (Data is only collected on a yearly basis.) That number is not included in the unemployment rate, since those persons are not in the labor force.

Among the unemployed, 44.3 percent of them have been out of work for 27 weeks or more and are counted as long-term unemployed. Despite 2010 being tied for the highest annual unemployment rate since 1948, employers are still wary of hiring people who have not been out of work for long.

Some job growth is better than none, or job losses. But it’s far from a recovery.

Update: The President spoke on the jobs report this morning in Maryland. He called the jobs report “positive,” but said it only “underscores the importance of not letting up on our efforts.”

From the study:

How many “American jobs” have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? [...] The model predicts that while cheaper offshoring reduces the share of natives among less skilled workers, cheaper immigration does not, but rather reduces the share of offshored jobs instead. Moreover, since both phenomena have a positive “cost-savings” effect they may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilled workers. Our model also predicts that offshoring will push natives toward jobs that are more intensive in communication-interactive skills and away from those that are manual and routine intensive. We test the predictions of the model on data for 58 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 2000-2007 and find evidence in favor of a positive productivity effect such that immigration has a positive net effect on native employment while offshoring has no effect on it. We also find some evidence that offshoring has pushed natives toward more communication-intensive tasks while it has pushed immigrants away from them.

Klein has made this point before, as have a number of other economists. A paper released in August by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco corroborates this point, finding immigration has no “significant” effect on the number of jobs available to Americans. Of course, these results don’t mean immigration causes positive economic benefits for everyone: Most experts acknowledge that American workers in low-skilled jobs can be negatively impacted by immigrants who are willing to work for lower pay, while illegal immigration allows for exploitation and less power for workers in certain sectors.

The key to this type of growth, according to economists, would be creating a legal immigration system that better responds to the needs of the economy. The current visa system is largely based on family reunification, allotting only 15 percent of visas for employment-based purposes. In certain industries, such as agriculture, employers argue there are simply not enough visas available to meet the need for workers. AgJOBS, a bill that would allow two million farm workers to work in the U.S. and eventually become legal residents, would relieve this problem somewhat, but so far has little Republican support.

The labor market remains an estimated 8.1 million payroll jobs below where it was at the start of the recession in December 2007.  This number includes both the 7.8 million jobs lost in the payroll data as currently published plus the announced preliminary benchmark revision of -366,000 jobs to last March’s employment level.  And even this number understates the size of the gap in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that simply to keep up with the growth in the working-age population, the labor market should have added around 3.4 million jobs since December 2007. This means the labor market is now roughly 11.5 million jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession unemployment rate (5.0 percent in December 2007).

In graphic terms: 

That begs the question: How will the economy get there? And leads to the worrying answer: It won’t, at least not anytime soon. Government spending — the kind that might, say, hire hundreds of thousands of construction workers — is out of the question. And that means private businesses will chip away at unemployment when the economy picks up a bit more, adding workers slowly, very slowly.

Two reports released this morning give fuel to those worries. Payroll processing firm ADP said private-sector employers cut 39,000 jobs last month, more than economists expected. In August, the private sector added 10,000 jobs. And a separate report (PDF) from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed that private and public employers planned to cut 7 percent more jobs in September than in August, though both numbers were near historical lows.

More job cuts, and more planned job cuts. That demonstrates that employers remain loath to add on workers, given the economy-wide lack of demand. And it means the unemployment rate will remain high.

The big picture is that government and professional services (think white-collar jobs like accounting, law, consulting) are absorbing as many workers as the manufacturing and financial industries are shedding. (This is not to say that a worker who would have become a die caster is becoming a tax attorney — just that we know where the jobs are shifting.) Mandel adds, “We hear anecdotes about young college grads being forced to work as waitstaff in restaurants, and here’s one indication that might be more common than we would like — the number of young college grads working in hotels and restaurants is up 33K over the past year.”

But overall, employment among college graduates has grown by about 130,000 positions — not bad, given the economic straits. Things look much bleaker for low-income workers, to look at a different demographic breakdown. Today, Menzie Chinn posted this terrifying graphic:

As one might expect, the less a worker was making before she lost her job, the higher the chance she is unemployed or underemployed today.

Hazelroth went through his program’s successes, then brought up “an unusual financing request” from the mayor of Los Angeles, who had come to Washington earlier in the year looking not for a grant, but for a loan or loan guarantee. The mayor’s shovel-ready transportation projects would take thirty years to build on a pay-as-you-go plan, Hazelroth explained, but by borrowing the money, using a tax as security, the city could finish the project in a third of that time.

Hazelroth continued: “The initial reaction to the Mayor’s request was that such a program doesn’t exist. That is exactly my point here today. A national infrastructure bank is designed to respond to just this kind of need.”

This week, President Barack Obama proposed exactly this sort of bank, as part of a Labor Day push for jobs. The national infrastructure bank would “leverage private and state and local capital to invest in projects that are most critical to our economic progress,” the White House said. “This marks an important departure from the federal government’s traditional way of spending on infrastructure through earmarks and formula-based grants that are allocated more by geography and politics than demonstrated value.”

The idea for a national infrastructure bank has been around for decades, with proposals coming intermittently from legislators on both sides of the aisle. In 2007, for instance, Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) proposed just such a bank, arguing that “current federal financing methods do not adequately distribute funding based on an infrastructure project’s size, location, cost, usage, or economic benefit to a region or the entire nation.”

It’s because of that lack of “adequate distribution” of funds that so many people want a national infrastructure bank. Right now, most infrastructure projects happen because individual politicians make them happen — appropriating, via old-fashioned pork-barrel politics, specific funds for specific bridges, highways or rail lines. (You can see examples of this in the distribution of stimulus funding, and federal funding more generally. Money does not naturally flow to states with the highest unemployment rates or greatest infrastructure needs.)

A national bank would have an appointed but politically sheltered board to grant funds to or loans for projects based on national concerns. And now is a particularly good time for that to happen. The United States desperately needs infrastructure improvements, even with the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funding thousands of upgrade projects. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers are unemployed. The cost of construction has dropped. And interest rates are at record lows.

That said, Obama’s proposal is not much to go on — and you cannot divine how effective a bank would be without reading the fine print, says Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation.

For one, it is not clear whether the bank would take the jobs situation into account when choosing which projects to fund. “Obama is couching this as a jobs program, and that worries me,” Moore says. “Let’s say we’ve got a bridge in Alaska that’s a complex project, a big bridge that goes across to an island. It’s going to create 7,000 jobs. And let’s say you’ve got a road in Los Angeles that is near a congested freeway and needs to be widened. That project is going to create 1,000 jobs.

“Under this proposal, the money is going to go to the Alaskan bridge, to make more jobs, even though the Los Angeles road is going to create more wealth in the longer term.”

Moreover, ADP revised down July’s increase from 42,000 jobs to 37,000. Over the past six months, private employers have added 37,000 jobs per month, according to ADP’s estimates. To put that in context, the economy needs to add 100,000 to 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the country’s growing population, and there are currently 14.5 million unemployed persons looking for work.

On top of all that, ADP notes that it expects the government’s official employment report, due on Friday, to be worse. “[T]oday’s [ADP] figure does not include the effects of federal hiring — and now firing — for the 2010 Census,” the company notes. “Hiring for the census peaked in May. For this reason, Friday’s figure for the change in nonfarm total employment reported by the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] might be weaker than today’s estimate for nonfarm private employment in the ADP National Employment Report.”

That means that both private and public employment might decline — meaning, unless the labor force shrinks dramatically, the unemployment rate will rise.

The shift [towards hiring] underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever. Since employment bottomed out in February, New York securities firms have added nearly 2,000 jobs, a trend that is also playing out nationwide at financial companies, commodity contract traders and investment firms.

Though the figures are small in comparison to overall Wall Street employment, executives, economists and headhunters say they expect the growth to pick up steam in the coming months.

“I think we’re seeing some hiring in anticipation of better times,” said Rae Rosen, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Wall Street typically hires in anticipation of the recovery, and there is a sense that the economy has bottomed out and is slowly improving.”

But the headline elides the point of the article. Granted, Rae Rosen believes that Wall Street is hiring in anticipation of better times. But the article, and the data, show that times are already pretty darn good.

The Wall Street firms that made it out of the credit crunch and the financial collapse alive are doing just fine, in fact. They have less competition from companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns. That means more profits.

They also are benefiting handsomely from low interest rates. It is Banking 101: Wall Street firms borrow billions from the government for close to nothing, lend it out and make money on the margin. That means more profits.

Companies like Goldman Sachs are more profitable now than they were in the boom years. That, really, is why they are hiring — not because they are betting on a strong economic recovery. They are making money hand-over-fist despite the fact that the rest of the economy is ailing terribly, and only starting to turn around.

The report bodes well for Friday’s major jobs report. Economists expect the economy to have added 500,000 jobs and the overall unemployment rate to track down. The data will be slightly skewed because of temporary census hiring. Still, it will hopefully augur an accelerating recovery, given that the weekly initial jobless claims and other metrics have stagnated.

Year-on-year, the stats are less good: The unemployment rate rose in 291 metro areas and fell in 73. In April, El Centro, Calif., recorded the highest rate of joblessness — 27.9 percent. The state in general carried the greatest number of hard-hit areas. Of 14 metro areas with unemployment rates above 15 percent, 11 were in California.