There's one piece of fact on which Mitt Romney has built his ridiculous "Obama's war on women" tales: women have not done well in the recovery. (Never mind that you'd likely rather be on the losing side of a recovery than still stuck in recession.)
Contributing to women's economic struggles is the fact that women make up a higher proportion of the public sector workforce than of the private sector; on top of that, they have been disproportionately affected by public sector layoffs. But that's not all:
In the private sector, meanwhile, some growth is evident but out of sync with the losses: [From June 2009 to March 2012], women picked up 680,000 of the 2.9 million jobs added. Demand for traditionally female-dominated positions, such as secretaries and administrative assistants, remains weak.
It's not just jobs, though. As Huffington Post's Matt Sledge details, women are also disproportionately hurt by many "austerity" measures:
Women, for example, make up two-thirds of the adult recipients of Medicaid. They are also the primary providers -- and primary recipients -- of child care assistance, which is generally supported through a mix of federal and state funds.
But many states have recently cut child care support and Medicaid funding to balance their budgets.
Those cuts, of course, have been led by Romney's party, as has congressional resistance to legislation that would improve the economy and create jobs. And that was the Republican strategy from the moment Obama was inaugurated: keep the economy lousy in order to run against his failure to fix it. The fact that Romney is forced to talk specifically about women is a result not just of the backlash against the Republican war on women but of the economic recovery (however inadequate) that Republicans tried to prevent.