(Tim Boyle/Bloomberg) “And if you look at the damage early on, you know, most of the early job losses were in construction and manufacturing, and disproportionately affected men. But as the crisis intensified, as it did over the course of 2008 — again, before the president came into office — the damage spread and you saw state and local governments, for example, cut back into teachers, fired a lot of teachers, let a lot of teachers go. And a lot of women teach, so you saw the composition of those job losses change over the course of the recovery.”
— Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” April 15, 2012
We criticized Republicans last week for promoting the “true but false” assertion
that under Obama, women have lost seven times as many jobs as men. This
did not stop the Mitt Romney campaign from trying to promote this idea,
which Treasury Secretary Geithner on Sunday labeled “ridiculous and
deeply misleading.”
We did not think much of the GOP claim
because, even though the numbers added up, it is silly to think any
economy begins or ends with a presidency. Over the course of the
recession (December 2007 to June 2009), the number of jobs declined by just over 5 million, with women accounting for nearly 1.8 million of that figure.
Still,
since the recession ended, 2.2 million jobs have been added under
Obama, with women accounting for just 284,000 of that figure. So
something’s going on. Geithner’s theory — that women started to lose
jobs later in the recession — is an interesting one, so we decided to
dig deep in the Bureau of Labor Statistics database for some answers.
The Facts
Teaching (listed in the BLS database as “local
government-education”) represents about 9 percent of the jobs held by
women in the United States. The data show that, since Obama became
president, a larger proportion of the overall job loss by women — 22.7
percent — has been in teaching positions.
In
fact, more than a third of female job losses have been in local
government jobs; the number of female-held jobs in the federal
government has also declined by about 51,000, while state government
declines have been marginal. (Since the numbers in the local government
section of the database are not seasonally adjusted, we compared figures
for January 2009 with January 2012. Comparing figures of the same month
is more accurate, especially in teaching.)
Interestingly, the
data suggest that local teaching positions held by women climbed by
124,000 in the year before Obama became president, even as the rest of
the economy was collapsing. This made the decline feel even steeper when
teaching jobs began to decline in earnest toward the beginning of 2010,
as federal stimulus money from 2009 began to fade and local governments
ran short of funds.
Okay, that kind of supports Geithner’s
narrative, though he seemed to suggest that much of this happened before
Obama became president, not after. Moreover, it does not explain where
the rest of the jobs for women have gone during Obama’s presidency.
That’s
because women have not just lost public-sector jobs under Obama. Women
have also lost private-sector jobs — some 243,000, compared to a gain of
82,000 in the same period for men.
Clicking through the various
job categories, one finds one negative number after another for women —
in construction, in manufacturing, in financial services, in retail, in
information and so forth. These categories do not even show any uptick
from the end of the recession.
One of the few bright spots for
women is professional and business services (which includes lawyers,
accountants, computer systems and the like), which shows a gain of more
than 400,000 jobs since the recession ended. The leisure and hospitality
industry also shows a marginal gain.
While Geithner said that
“early losses” were in construction and manufacturing, slightly more
construction jobs have been lost after Obama became president rather
than before; manufacturing jobs also have continue to drop sharply. A
large chunk of the gains for men has also come in professional and
business services, as well as durable goods (such as building
automobiles) and in transportation. Women, meanwhile, have continued to
lose jobs in durable goods and transportation.
A Treasury
Department official defended Geithner’s statement, but would not do so
on the record.
“One feature of the recovery is that while employment in
the private sector has started to come back, government employment is
still falling,” the official said. “Moreover, of those changes in
government employment, a large share are accounted for by changes in
local government educational services (i.e. teachers).”
The
official added: “If you compare employment changes from December 2007 to
January 2009 versus January 2009 to March 2012, government represents
the only sector that has performed much worse. Every other industry has
either had relatively similar job changes on net across the two time
periods (e.g. construction) or is doing much better (e.g. manufacturing,
professional and business services, retail trade, leisure and
hospitality, transportation and warehousing, mining and logging, etc.).”
“Every
sector is doing better from February 2010 – March 2012 (most
substantially so) than they were from January 2009 – February 2010,
while government job losses have accelerated over that period,” the
official said. “Teachers represent a large proportion of these state and
local government job losses, which is why the Secretary highlighted
them.”
The Pinocchio Test
Geithner’s explanation appears incomplete. Certainly the
decline in teaching — and government — jobs has been a drag on overall
employment for women in recent months, but it’s not the whole story. We
continue to frown on measuring job losses or job gains from the start of
a presidency, but even our preferred metric of dating the trends from the start of the recovery suggest that women are not faring as well as men in this economy.
We
were tempted to say this was worth a Pinocchio, simply because
Geithner’s explanation seems so facile. The data suggest a more
complicated picture. But given that the data change depending on the
dates used, we remain reluctant at this point to attach too much
significance to the results. Certainly, the trends are worth watching.
Verdict Pending
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