At Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Carly Fiorina hit President Obama on women’s employment.
Calling it the “height of hypocrisy” for Democratic contender Hillary Clinton to talk about being the first woman president when every policy she and Obama back has been “demonstrably bad for women,” she claimed that women experienced 92 percent of the jobs loss during Obama’s first term.
Fiorina and her competitor Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also claimed that 3 million women have fallen into poverty during Obama’s presidency, holding it up as proof that his policies have hurt women.
It’s not clear where the candidates came up with the 3 million figure, but according to the Census Bureau, between 2009 and 2014 1.85 million women fell into poverty. During the same time period, 1.23 million men fell into poverty.
While Fiorina is right that extreme poverty has been rising, a lot of that can be traced to welfare reform enacted in the 1990s that has meant sharply reduced benefits, fewer families enrolled, and strict requirements for those who are in the program. The number of American families living on $2 or less per person each day has risen sharply since then, particularly among people directly affected by the changes.
Fiorina is not the first Republican presidential candidate to claim that 92 percent of job loss was shouldered by women. During the 2012 race, Mitt Romney used the same figure. But it’s misleading, if not factually wrong.
Employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women lost 362,000 jobs between January 2009 — Obama took office on January 21 — and March 2012, the timeframe originally cited by Romney and the Republican National Committee to get to the 92 percent figure. There were 303,000 jobs lost overall during that period.
But women’s job loss was following a decline that began under President George W. Bush. Between their peak in January of 2008 and when Obama took office a year later, women lost 1.13 million jobs. The recession, which was causing everyone’s job losses, didn’t begin under Obama’s watch.
Women were also losing more jobs during the early part of Obama’s tenure because the recession impacted them more heavily during the latter part of the recession and the recovery period. During the initial recession between December 2007 and January 2009, men lost more than 5 million jobs while women lost around 2 million. Male-heavy industries like construction and manufacturing were hit hard relatively quickly when the housing bubble burst. But the ripple effect hurt women later on when dried up tax revenue and other budget pressures prompted state and local governments to lay off much of their workforces, including a lot of teachers, all female-dominated jobs.
Today, as we near the end of Obama’s tenure, women and men have nearly identical unemployment rates — 4.6 and 4.7 percent, respectively, as of September. While greater government spending might have stemmed women’s job losses during the early recovery period, something Republicans by and large opposed, they have at least recovered just as well as men under Obama’s watch.