Romney: loves women, hates men.

Seems fairly ridiculous for a Republican, who claims that regulation is the bane of a free market, to complain that women were losing their jobs at a faster pace under the Obama Administration.  If you've been paying attention, conservative economists insist that you can't do anything to make the economy recover faster than some natural business cycle.

So what exactly would Republicans do -- make it illegal to discriminate, based on gender?  Already done under Democrats.  See: Civil Rights Act of 1964 - prohibits job discrimination based on, among other things, sex. Passed by a Democratically-controlled Senate and House, signed into law by a Democratic President, no less.

Short of providing incentives for businesses to hold onto women - in other words giving federal money away in one form or another - and digging deeper into the hypocrite's hole (see: reverse job discrimination), there's nothing Republicans could do.

Are Republicans going to force businesses to lay off one man for every one woman laid off, and vice versa?  Seems pretty stupid that Romney even broach the subject, don't you think?

Behind the scenes, away from the cameras, I can imagine diehard conservatives are foaming at the mouth at the suggestion that somehow Republicans should interfere in a free market.

But let's examine what Romney is saying, because he's only telling you half the story.

If you look at Catherine Rampell's NYT entry on the matter, not only were men the first to lose their jobs, but they were also far more likely to lose their jobs over the last 5 years than women.

Instead of allowing the Romney camp to spread a white lie, just look at the wider picture.

If you use an index where the start of the recession = 100, you can see that men lost jobs FASTER very early on, and by last month, remain BELOW women in employment.  There was no conspiracy against women; if anything women were the last shoe to drop, after men lost their jobs.

(I'm not going to show it, but if you look back at the last decade, women were last to hire, last to fire.  You can visually see part of it in one of Catherine Rampell's referenced charts from the previous link.)

So of course you know what the Republicans would have said, if men continued to lose their jobs while women kept more of their jobs: the Obama Administration hates males.

By inverse argument therefore, Romney hates men.