Statement by Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, April 6, 2012
In an effort to fight back against Democratic claims of a Republican “war on women,” the Republican National Committee has rolled out a new and startling fact—that under Obama, women have lost seven times as many jobs as men.
We found this statistic surprising because we had been under the impression that men had fared worse than women in the recession. So do the RNC’s numbers add up?
The Facts
First of all, readers know we frown on the somewhat arbitrary dividing line of measuring jobs statistics by presidential terms. It is a common journalistic — and political — metric. But restarting the employment clock from the moment the president takes the oath of office doesn’t tell you much about a his performance, especially since it takes time for the new president’s policies to take effect.
We’ve argued, without much success, that it would make more sense to measure Obama’s job performance from the end of the recession — June 2009 — since that would also allow at least five months for his policies, such as the stimulus bill, to kick in.
But just as Democrats prefer to measure job growth starting with the period when positive job growth started, Republicans prefer to date Obama’s performance from the moment he took office, as the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month.
The RNC calculated these figures 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. The numbers, derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, do add up.
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