For decades America has been steadily approaching a major social development — a time when the number of women in the work force would surpass the number of men. That moment has now arrived, brought on by, of all things, a recession.

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he vowed that if elected he would take up George Bush’s failed 2007 effort to reform the nation’s immigration policy, secure U.S. borders and provide a path to citizenship for undocumented persons who had lived in America for years. Since then, however, issues such as health care reform have pushed immigration to the back burner.

San Joaquin County needed 3,000 more unemployed workers like it needed a hole in the head, but that’s what it got with the closing of the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont and the related layoffs at its major suppliers.

Steve Moore, of Rex Moore Electrical Contracting, spent a decade handing over the reins of the family business to a fourth generation.

For decades, the contours of the Capital Region economy seemed etched in stone. Government, manufacturing and construction employed the bulk of the population. After the boom and bust of the past decade, however, the job profile of the future could be almost unrecognizable.

Last November, San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen gave a speech on the national economy and put the prospects for the commercial real estate market in stark perspective.

Several projects are in the pipeline that could strengthen the Port of West Sacramento as a hub of green activity as soon as 2011.

The year was 1943, the world was at war and Dick Bertolucci cruised the streets of Sacramento in his first car — a black ’33 Chevy Roadster. He was 13 and didn’t have a license.

Northern California manufacturers and distributors of everything from barrels to bottles to pesticides for the region’s wine industry are using the same juxtaposition to sum up the wine market: “up and down.”

On paper it looks like the Capital Region has the makings of a world-class clean-tech hub: access to policy makers at the Capitol, access to innovative research churning out of UC Davis, and housing that’s affordable for green-collar workers. What this equation doesn’t account for, however, is how fast California is losing its competitive edge to other states and the global economy.