Seven point two. And counting. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, the most recent unemployment rate is 7.2 percent. On February 6, we will get the next installment of bad news. The big number gives us a backdrop for what bloggers like Deborah have been reporting on in a more personal way–that the Great Recession we’re in requires that us all to learn new things about ourselves. The downturn also helps us understand some old things, like inequality.

In the New York Times the other week, a blogger took a look at gender and unemployment and put the following together: the rates of unemployment are increasing for everyone, but they are increasing at a higher rate for men than for women, and at a higher rate for African Americans and Latinos than for other groups. As men fall out of their jobs at a higher rate, women are coming very close to being 50% of the workforce. The Times blogger asked, is this “A Milestone for Working Women?” The question is meant, I think, to be ironic: could it be that this bad news for the economy is kinda good news for the ladies?

Like so many other things, though, this employment question is not a a zero sum—in other words, men’s losses are not women’s gains, or any one else’s. As an alternative to any kind of zero-sum thinking, I suggest that we think about the meaning and function of work.

The meaning of work, as well as of “unemployment” and “employment,” continues to be something different for men and women. As I pointed out in November, recent research shows that on the job women work harder for less pay their male counterparts. And not because women have less experience. (For the latest on this, see Center for American Progress’s Equal Pay for Breadwinners report by Heather Boushey.)

Here’s an idea. Working status might best be understood as lying on a continuum: there are the unemployed (want a job, can’t find one), the underemployed (have some work, want more), the employed, and the overemployed (let’s call it the second shift category). (By the way, the BLS offers a bunch of alternative measures of unemployment; that 7.2 percent figure is called “U-3″—the official unemployment rate. But there’s another number, the “U-6″—or the underemployment rate, which in December 2008 hit 13.5 percent.)

The idea of overemployment adds important balance to the continuum. Overemployment–though not an official BLS designation—conventionally applies to people who are working well beyond full-time hours. But it is also useful to use it to think about all those people who are working their jobs—(or even just working hard to find a job)—while doing a second shift caring for their sick or infirm family members, or doing the inexhaustible amount of paperwork necessary to get any coverage for health-care services, and so forth (can you say health care reform?). Overemployment in this sense includes those who are doing their “real” jobs, and then doing a second shift taking care of their household and their kids (can you say work/family policy reform?). I could go on. But you’ve heard this argument a million times before, for example, in the work of Nancy Folbre or Heidi Hartmann.

Such a continuum would help us to track how much unpaid but socially and economically necessary work is being done—and by whom. Such a continuum might give President Obama and his team the bright idea that some of that overemployment—all the unpaid carework–could be officially transformed into value in the official economy. Of course, this is exactly the logic behind many excellent columns, like this one by Philip Cohen, regarding ways to keep gender in the equation when planning our stimulus.

Bottom line? We are all in this together, yes, but we are not all the same. When commentators emphasize the concerns of specific groups–women, Latina workers, African American auto workers, immigrants–they are identifying groups that share the whole problem. But they are reminding us that finding ways out of the current crisis requires attention to social inequalities that both cause and reflect our economic inequalities. Even if some employment stats go up, we will not be out of the woods until they go up across the board.

–Virginia Rutter