But not that hard. (I probably remember the difference between percent and percentage points, even if high school weren't almost beyond recall.) Romer and Bernstein never suggest that the female unemployment rate rose only 20% of the rate of men's. That would indeed be bizarre. They mix up the unemployment rate with the jobs lost rate. That's how they get their counterintuitive results. The whole purpose of the piece was to point up that those two measures are not comparable, and that the unemployment rate is the proper measure of the problem.

Had I been inclined to make the extraordinarily stupid mistake JS attributes to me, I would have been swiftly disabused, as the BLS report I link to quite clearly shows that the female unemployment base rate in January of 2008 was 4.7, while the male rate was 5.1.