Introducing The Princess, a Column by Linda Hirshman.

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Last month I got a wrenching phone message from a woman who cleans apartments in New York City. Not someone who was dating a laid-off banker or had her sushi allowance cut. A maid. Did I know anyone who might hire her? Apartment 5F lost his job, 5B had to move to Texas for work, and 10A had to spend her extra funds for a sick mother. I called her back. She told me that she and her husband of 40 years are about to lose their house.

Sen. Edward Kennedy's paper on the impact of the recession on women, "Taking a Toll," reported that 64 percent worried "a great deal about the economy." But whenever you try to get a little attention for these women, someone always talks about how much worse off men are. In December, when I criticized the administration's proposal to create jobs in fields that were 90 percent male, conservatives complained that men had experienced about 80 percent of the lay offs, and so quit yer bitchin.

This is a totally bogus argument, but you need to know some economics to explain why. Instead, while the conservatives are manipulating the numbers, and the important male economic bloggers are ignoring the women completely, we popular women writers tend to go for the soft news recession stories, like the one I just told about the maid. What's missing on the web is a feminist economist who can both do the math and get attention for it.

A review of the archives of three influential feminist blogs reveals (with few exceptions) that in December, they were almost entirely silent on public spending and economics while the Obama administration prepared to dispense the largest amount of public spending in the history of western civilization. As the recession worsened, the coverage on the topic continued to be spotty, and, on our mother blog, XX Factor, the relatively few posts about the downturn can charitably be described as recession lite. Contributors discussed the TV shows and movies people watch more of when they're broke. They noted lipstick, coffee machine sales, and tailor shop business as measures of economic suffering, and curvier models as a happy byproduct. Emily Bazelon's series on the possible effect of layoffs on family gender roles is serious enough, but, again, more about relationships than economics.

It's important to do the math. Because when you do, it's easy to knock down the claim that men should get most of the stimulus benefits because they lost most of the jobs. The crucial number when you're planning a jobs program is not who lost jobs when. It's how many people are unemployed and looking for work—the unemployment rate. Last December the unemployment rate for women was about 70 percent of the rate for men-lower, but not that much lower. Yet it appeared that women would get little more than 10 percent of the benefits provided for in the stimulus package. In the intervening months, the package improved for women, but their unemployment rate worsened to 7.5 percent in March, 78 percent of the rate for men. Also factor in that female-headed households have much lower incomes—one-third of the earnings of married couples and half of what a man alone makes, according to economist Randy Albelda of the University of Massachusetts-Boston.