Did More Women Lose Jobs? Fuzzy Republican Math Fails To Convince

The Republican National Committee alarmed at alienating women in an effort to divert attention and shift the blame on the Democrats, disclosed that more women, than men have lost their jobs under Obama’s administration.

Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee said, “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.”

Bay Buchanan, a longtime GOP activist declared, “One million women have lost their jobs under this administration, nearly one million have become unemployed as a result of Obama’s policies. That is 92 percent of the jobs lost while Barack Obama has been president

Was this just election rhetoric? How did the RNC reach such specific figures?

First of all, it is unfair to the President to judge his performance from day one at the office. It takes time for policies to take effect. A more reasonable and realistic date would be to assess him from the end of the recession, June 2009. That would mean that his policies had at least five months to show their effect.

Political compulsions however, make Republicans want to date Obama’s performance from the day he took oath and the Democrats, naturally from the day when positive growth started.

The RNC derived the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and came to their conclusions by, “comparing the decline in the number of all nonfarm employees from January 2009 to March 2012 with the decline in jobs held by women in that period.”

Since Obama took office on January 20, taking the data from the first of January dilutes the findings and questions its authenticity. Taking February as the starting point, the overall loss of jobs is 16,000, while women lost 48,000. How could women lose more jobs than the overall total?

If you evaluate the President’s performance from, December 2007, the day the recession began, the total losses of jobs was over 5 million and of these nearly 1.8 million jobs were held by women.

Over the last year, March 2011 to March 2012, Men gained nearly 1.9 million jobs while women gained 635,000 jobs. Since men lost more jobs in the recession, it was logical that when the recovery started they stood to gain more. The latest employment rate reflected this, inasmuch as male workforce was up by 14,000, while female participation fell 177,000. That is also because; women are working in jobs that have faced the brunt of cuts, for example teaching and healthcare.

Kara Sullivan, a BLS economist said, “The overall ratio of jobs held by women has remained unchanged. In January 2009, 49.5 percent of jobs in the U.S. were held by women. As of March 2012, 49.3 percent of the jobs were held by women. The 0.02 percent change is statistically insignificant. Jobs held by women still make up the same proportion of all jobs as they did in January 2009.”

Should Obama be blamed or is this not a true judge of the success or failure of his policies. Are not state governors equally or even more responsible, since they are the ones who have slashed jobs. The fuzzy RNC logic is debatable.

Sean Spicer, RNC director of communications argues, “If employment was growing in the way he predicted he would certainly be taking credit for it so I think it equally fair to acknowledge how it is falling short.”