Statement: Women account for 92.3 percent of the jobs lost under Obama.
Speaker: mitt romney
About the speaker: Mitt Romney is a U.S. senator from Utah. He ran for president in 2012 as the Republican nominee, losing to incumbent President Barack Obama. Prior to that, Romney served one term as governor of Massachusetts, elected to the post in 2002. He was born in 1947 in Michigan, where his father was governor from 1963 to 1969. Romney graduated from Brigham Young University and received both a law degree and an MBA from Harvard University. Romney helped found the investment firm Bain Capital in 1984, which launched or rebuilt such companies as Staples and Dominos Pizza. Romney managed the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from 1999-2002. He ran for president in 2008 but lost the Republican nomination. He and his wife, Ann, have five sons, Tagg, Craig, Matt, Ben and Josh.
Date: April 6, 2012
Location: national
Topics: corrections and updates;jobs;women
Context: Mitt Romney's website
Fact-check justification:     Romney's website said that women account for 92.3 percent of jobs lost under Obama.     By comparing job figures with January 2009 and March 2012 and weighing them against women’s job figures from the same periods, Saul came up with 92.3 percent. The numbers are accurate but quite . First, Obama cannot be held entirely accountable for the employment picture on the day he took office, just as he could not be given credit if times had been booming. Second, by choosing figures from January 2009, months into the recession, the statement ignored the millions of jobs lost before then, when most of the job loss fell on men. In every recession, men are the first to take the hit, followed by women. It's a historical pattern, Stevenson told us, not an effect of Obama's policies.     There is a small amount of  to the , but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it . Addendum We considered the Romney campaign's complaints but do not see any  that warrants changing our ruling. The other economists agreed the statement was  and, for the most part, said it wrongly blamed Obama for broad trends that were part of a long, deep recession. Bruce Bartlett, a former official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said much of the decline for women was in the public sector. "To the extent there have been excessive job losses among women, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been an enormous reduction in state and local government employment," Bartlett said. "The decline ... has been especially pronounced in this recession as opposed to other recessions." This chart from the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed group, bears that out. In earlier recessions, public-sector jobs began increasing again as the economy stabilized. After the most recent recession, they have continued to disappear. Again, these are jobs heavily held by women. Bartlett added that many of those government jobs were eliminated in states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. This story in the Atlantic cited a study by the liberal Roosevelt Institute finding that the 11 states that went Republican in 2010 accounted for 40.5 percent of all state and local government job losses. Jeff Hayes is a senior research analyst with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, an organization affiliated with George Washington University’s public policy graduate program that receives contributions from groups including the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Hayes added that "there’s a lag before the lost tax revenue catches up and government jobs are lost. "If you break out the 683,000 jobs women lost between January 2009 and March 2012, 64 percent were in government and only 36 percent in the private sector." That leads us to a point made by Eileen Appelbaum with the left-leaning Center on Economic and Policy Research. She noted that after the first wave of money in the president’s stimulus bill had run out, Obama asked for another $23 billion in "emergency aid" for state and local governments . The money was sought to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers, but House Republican leaders stripped it. "You could hardly blame Obama for that," Appelbaum said. As for the comparison with the PolitiFact Georgia item, such direct comparisons are tricky. In this case, the Georgia ruling was on the simpler question of the job creation under President Ronald Reagan, while the Romney  omitted the critical detail of the loss of jobs for men before Obama took office. Other fact-checking organizations have examined Romney's  and come to similar conclusions. The Associated Press said using the 92.3 percent figure as a measure of Obama’s record on women was "dubious at best." First Read , a politics blog by NBC News, had this to say: "Does anyone believe, with a straight face, that nine in 10 job losses over the past three years have been women workers?" And the New York Times disputed the emphasis on the job losses occurring "under Obama." "Presidents get too much credit or blame for changes in the business cycle. Contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama had or have the unilateral ability to steer the country into good or bad job markets. Neither would a President Romney," Times economics writer Catherine Rampell wrote in the Economix blog . We’ll conclude with this point: Experts agree that the economic recovery has not helped women as much as men. Howard Wall, an economics professor at Lindenwood University, said it’s fair to fault Obama for that. But he took issue with the timeframe of the Romney campaign’s  -- starting in January 2009 while the recession was still on. "I think you have to kind of divide the timeline. Call it the Bush recession and the Obama recovery," Wall said. "I don’t give them (the Obama administration) credit for stopping the fall or causing the fall. They had nothing to do with that. But they own the recovery." Does all this mean that Obama’s policies have brought hard times to women? Said Bartlett, the conservative: "There’s no reason to think so."