Mitt Romney said yesterday that women lost 92.3 percent of all jobs lost under the Obama administration, a claim that earned the suspicious distinction of “true but false” from the Washington Post fact-check team. The reason for this contradictory finding? While WaPo conceded the statistic was mathematically accurate, they added the odd, squishy disclaimer that it “may simply [be] a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with ‘Obama’s job market.’”
But while it might be unfair to say Obama’s policies are fully responsible for the disproportionate impact the recession has had on women, there’s no denying that fact that women have been hit hardest. Even WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler notes this in his analysis:
In other words, men did lose more jobs in the recession. Now that the economy is growing again, men are recovering jobs at a faster pace than women. In fact, the latest employment report shows that male participation in the work force was up 14,000 while female participation fell 177,000, in part because women tend to work in retail or government jobs (such as teaching), which have been cut in recent months.
They’ve been cut in recent months because they were either temporary jobs (retail) or because stimulus money that once shielded certain jobs is now running out (education). This was an outcome many warned about and will likely continue as the year goes on. While the recent drop in unemployment has been encouraging, most of the job growth has been in low-wage sectors and temporary positions.
Romney is right to criticize Obama for the job-loss gender gap, particularly because Democrats have been falsely claiming that the GOP has been waging a war on women. But Romney also needs to explain why his policies would address the high job loss among women, and why Obama’s have so far failed to do so.
Ummmm….. n nLong pause…… n nThere are two very distinct groups of female (and male) workers and they can not be co-mingled if the statistics are to have any accuracy whatsoever….. n nThere are single women, and then there are married women with families. And what no one is saying here is that many of the married women with children went into (or remained in) the workforce because (a) their job was more secure than that of their husband's or (b) it had the health benefits, or (c) both of the aforementioned. I personally know husbands who stayed home with the kids while the wife worked and both were miserable but didn't really have a choice as someone had to work and she had the better opportunity at the time — both were putting their family ahead of themselves…. n nIf the economy really was turning around, and I am not sure it is, then as the men started to get their jobs back, you would see the women voluntarily leaving the workplace that they really didn't want to be in anyway — and particularly from the very short-term and temporary jobs that do appear to be declining. n nBut the larger issue is this male/female employment myth which many feminists have shown to be really fraudulent. The never-married childless college-educated woman under age 35 earns MORE than the never-married childless college-educated man of the same age. This is a fact. (It also extends into opportunities for women which is why we are seeing the women forced to work as they have the better paying job of the couple.) n nThis is why you have to look at median and mode as well as mean when you are calculating averages, this is why you have to be very careful in calculating statistics because the 60-year-old male earns more than *both* of the 20-somethings, combined, and skews the statistics. n nAnd unless we are going to go to the Soviet-style command economy where women were required to work full time (and hated Rachieva Goberchef because she didn't have to), we are going to have to recognize the fact that some women are going to choose to do other things with their lives – this is a free country, isn't it?