On April 6, 2012, Mitt Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama” – a claim also made on Romney’s website.
She followed it up a few hours later with this: “@BarackObama touts policies for women & 92.3% jobs lost under him r women’s. He’s even more clueless than we thought.”
When asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. Though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.
Betsey Stevenson, a business and public policy professor at Princeton University, pointed out that “in every recession, men’s job loss occurs first and most, with unemployment rates for men being more cyclical than those of women’s.”
She added that many of women’s job losses have been government jobs — teachers and civil servants — which have been slower to come back because they require greater government spending.
Remember, with the recession, many states who had trouble balancing budgets turned to education budgets eventually to make spending cuts. And most teachers tend to be women.
So have Obama’s policies been especially bad for women?
Said Stevenson: “I don’t think you could point to a single piece of evidence that the pattern of job loss: men first then women, is due to the president’s policies. It’s a historical pattern that has held in previous recessions.”
(source)
