PJ: Using women to make political points is all the rage in US politics...at least for now. First it was the kerfuffle on contraception then it was the cutely titled "Mommy Wars". It is a strange time for sure. When Rush Limbaugh, that bastion of conservative thought, calls women with whom he disaggrees "sluts", "babe" and "feminazis" his fans stay silent (or cheer). When Republican governors turn over laws designed to protect "equal pay" (as in the case of Wisconsin's Governor Walker: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/325705/20120409/scott-walker-recall-abortion-abstinence-sex-ed.htm) the base applauds. And when conservative lawmakers and their likely Presidential candidate Mitt Romney vows to take away funding for women's healthcare through defunding Planned Parenthood, whose major mission is providing healthcare to underprivilaged women (with less than 3% of their funding going toward abortion), the GOP chattering classes nod in agreement. And yet these same politicians and pundits use women as their political prop as if defending their rights all the while whittling them away.
The Economist
Job losses
Women out of work
NOW that the latest round of America's ongoing "Mommy Wars" appears to be simmering down, it might be a fitting time for cooler heads to consider the substance of the issue that generated all the faux-rage. At issue are Mitt Romney's recent claims that Barack Obama's policies have actually been bad for women—specifically, that as a result of the incumbent's policies, 92.3% of the net jobs lost in America since January 2009 have been lost by women. "The real war on women is being waged by the president's failed economic policies," is how Mr Romney put it. For Mr Romney's critics, the claim is a cynical gambit: an effort to convince the voters that despite what Mr Obama might say about women's rights, and despite the fact that some Republicans are inveighing against them, it is the president, armed with his economic policies, who is waging war. Even among Republicans, the claim has been received sceptically. "It just doesn't sound right," notes Byron York; most of this year's voters have been around for a while, that is, and they've noticed men losing a lot of jobs too.
This raises two questions. First of all, is it true? And secondly, if it were true, what should policymakers do about it, if anything?
The first question is relatively easy. We can refer to Politifact, which rated the statement "Mostly False". (This elicited an e-mail from Mr Romney's policy director asking for a recount; Politifact did review its research in response to the questions raised, and confirmed its initial rating.) Politifact's reasoning, which I would agree with, is that the statistic itself is misleading, and the causal analysis is incorrect. It's easy to see where the Romney campaign came up with the figure—between January 2009 (when Mr Obama was sworn in) and March 2012, America had a net loss of 740,000 non-farm payroll jobs, and of those, 683,000 jobs were lost by women. By January 2009, however, America had already been losing jobs for months; between December 2007 and June 2009, men lost about 5.4m jobs, net, and women lost 2.1m.
Per the labour economists consulted by Politifact, then, the numbers show a predictable pattern of job losses during a recession. Men lost jobs first, as the private sector shuddered. The losses for women (who are overrepresented in, for example, schools and civil service) became more noticeable over time, as states and cities started slashing their budgets in response to the recession. In addition, as one wonk notes, Mr Obama had actually asked Congress to authorise more aid to the states, which would have forestalled some of those government layoffs, but Congress declined; so whatever you think of Mr Obama's economic policies, if we are talking about specifically about job losses among women, Mr Obama, if he had his druthers, would have forestalled more of those losses than Congressional Republicans.
The second question is a bit trickier. If women have been hit harder by economic stresses outside of their control than men, I would argue that that would be a problem for policymakers. I would argue that it would be a worthwhile concern. Unemployment is difficult for those affected, and it has negative externalities for their families and communities. Intractable inequality also has negative externalities: while it's worse for the have-nots, obviously, no normal person benefits from other people's struggles. So if some subset of a population is disproportionately affected by a particular problem, addressing it is a worthwhile goal for others, whether the subset is people in a certain region, people who have been working in a particular industry, or people of a certain race or gender.
Interestingly, however, women aren't the ones struggling with jobs right now. Their unemployment rate has lagged that of men for most of the recession, and is now equal—not because women are losing jobs so much as because men have been going back to work. And significantly, women may be more insulated from job losses in the future than men. Many of the men's losses were in goods-producing sectors that will recover slowly, if at all. Women are more likely to work in service-providing jobs, such as schools or health care—functions where outsourcing is less likely, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects healthy job growth in the future. Women are also less likely to drop out of high school than men, and more likely to complete a bachelor's degree, both of which are outcomes that suggest that they should be more insulated than men from future job losses.
This isn't to say that women aren't concerned about economic issues, or that they don't face a harder road than men, in some respects. They continue to earn less money than men, for example, and remain responsible for a greater share of dependent care than men. As I said last week on Democracy in America, Mr Romney was right to say that women are concerned about economic issues, and that they have good reason to be. But if the issue at hand is strictly job losses, then the Romney campaign's claim doesn't make much sense. You might even say it's like when a shifty boyfriend turns up with flowers: one's appreciation of the gesture is tempered by suspicion.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/04/job-losses
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