Now
this is the real war on women.
(WFB) The Democratic Party plans to prominently feature women at its convention in Charlotte this week, an effort that could be haunted by the Obama administration’s troubled relationship and failed record with respect to the fairer sex.
The sluggish economy under President Obama has been particularly hard on women. Nearly six million are currently unemployed, more than 400,000 have lost their jobs, and poverty rates among women have soared to record highs.
Since Obama took office, the unemployment rate among women has jumped from 7 percent to 8.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Young women have fared even worse. Their unemployment rate has risen from 12.5 percent to 14.4 percent since 2009.
The jobless rate among single women, a demographic the Obama administration is targeting, has nearly doubled compared with prerecession levels.
A recent Pew report found that women are the only demographic group for which employment growth fell short of population growth between 2009-2011, and have consistently lagged behind men.
“By this yardstick, the economic recovery has proceeded in opposite directions for men and women,” Rakesh Kochhar, the report’s author, told the Hill.
“Where have all the women’s jobs gone?” CNN asked in April 2012, noting that the “mancession”—during which men lost twice as many jobs as women—has since turned into the “hecovery,” during which men have gained back four times as many jobs.
Even strong Obama backers concede that women are struggling. “Though we are seeing some recovery, we have not seen it in a recovery of jobs for women,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the left-wing Center For American Progress, told CNN. [...]
But this week’s convention speakers are unlikely to mention this, or the fact that Democratic officials—including the White House, the Obama campaign, the Senate Democratic caucus and the Democratic National Committee—consistently pay their female employees less than male employees. In some cases the wage gap between men and women far exceeds 23 percent figure Democrats regularly cite.
Senate Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) on Tuesday refused to answer a Washington Free Beacon reporter’s question about the disparity. Pelosi paid her female staff members almost 30 percent less than male staffers in 2011, a Free Beacon analysis found. [...]
Obama’s first communications director, Ellen Moran, resigned after just 92 days. “The president has a real woman problem,” another senior female official reportedly said, describing an atmosphere in which women often felt ignored by the president.
Former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers complained to the New York Times that the Obama administration did not “seem to have enough [women] inside of their own inner circle.”
In a 2011 article titled “The White House Boys’ Club: President Obama Has a Woman Problem,” Time magazine’s Amy Sullivan detailed the president’s preference for the company of men.
“There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings,” she wrote. “The president blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress.
That preference is reflected in the make up of the White House senior staff, which consisted of 74 men and just 48 women as of 2011.
Even before Obama took office, he was criticized in 2008 for paying the women on his campaign staff less than the men and far less than GOP opponent John McCain paid his female staffers.
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