Has Obama's Economy Been Worse For Women?

04/10/2012

2012 Election

As you know if you read PoliticOlogy, the Republicans are attempting to climb out of their self-dug hole with women voters through an economic message: President Obama's job policies have been bad for women. This argument began popping up on the RNC's Twitter feed during the Women's Economic Forum (though PoliticOlogy called it earlier), and the Washington Post's Fact Checker finds an official statement:

“For far too long women have been left behind in Obama’s job market. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. That is truly unsustainable.”

— Statement by Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, April 6, 2012

Counting from January 2009 (more on that later), the Fact Checker finds that the RNC's numbers add up. 740,000 jobs were shed overall, with women losing 683,000 of them, or 92%. Then the Fact Checker goes farther back, to the beginning of the recession in December of 2007. In the bigger picture, the economy has been worse for men (as has been commonly reported): since 12/07, the economy has lost just over 5 million jobs, with men accounting for 65% of the job losses.

So the RNC has point, at least timing-wise: while the recession has been worse overall for men, the recovery, which began under Obama, has favored them.

Caveat time. Counting from January of 2009 is ridiculous; Obama just took office on January 20, and his policies wouldn't have taken effect for months. The 3,058,000 jobs lost between January and June of 2009, including the 1 million lost by women, really belong to Bush. Starting from June 2009, when Obama's policies would be beginning to be felt, the economy boasted a net gain of 2.32 million jobs.

The math is not better for women, though. They gained only 300,000 of the jobs added since 2009, or only 12% of the overall recovery.

This may be because men simply had more room to make up, having suffered more than 3 million of the economy's job losses. It's also because, as the Fact Checker pointed out, women tend to work retail and government jobs, which have not been adding to the labor market recently. (Big box retailers, especially of the hardware variety, have been, suggesting a gain in the housing market.)

The RNC is missing the causal factor linking Obama's policies to women's anemic employment growth. But the figures are bad enough that I think the burden of proof is now on Obama's administration to explain the trend as a consequence or not of their economic policies.

Until November, expect to hear a lot more from the RNC, and from Mitt Romney, about Obama and women's jobs. PoliticOlogy doubts it will be enough to erase the damage the GOP did to itself over contraception, but it may go a long way toward helping them recovery blue collar and lower-middle class women voters in swing states, whom they desperately need.

---

Join: ElectionOlogy

Follow: Evan McMurry @evanmcmurry | PoliticOlogy @OlogyPolitics