WH Press Sec Jay Carney and exploiting gender gap

Transcript here. Excerpt:

'Q Jay, thank you. I want to go back to the women’s conference on Friday. There’s a pretty obvious political strategy from Chicago to exploit the gender gap that you have. It’s in a lot of public polls that women, by a wide margin, are supporting the President over Mitt Romney or any other Republican paired up against him. Why are you using the White House on Friday to stage an event that clearly has some political implications?

MR. CARNEY: Ed, by that — you’re saying that anything that has to do with women has political -- so anything that has to do with growing the economy, because I think every political analyst out there would say that a stronger recovery would be good for the President politically, or anything that has to do with job creation is inherently political because more jobs would be good for the President.

Q So what day are you having a men’s conference on the economy? (Laughter.)

MR. CARNEY: Well, stay tuned. Ed, that’s kind of a silly question.

Q — because you’re only focused on half of the population.

MR. CARNEY: This administration has engaged in a number of policy approaches designed to address women in the economy, including the very first bill that the President signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Act — Fair Pay Act — and there are a variety of initiatives that this administration has put forward that deal with issues of concern to women in particular. There is the Violence Against Women Act. We have an office overseen by the Vice President’s office that deals with that legislation. So these are important policy initiatives; that’s why we’re having the conference.'