As women's labor force participation rates have continued to increase, it has become commonplace to argue that the targets that policy planners set for average unemployment rates should be adjusted upwards to correct' for the fact that women's unemployment rates have historically been higher than men's.1 In this paper, we argue that most corrections are based on an oversimplified approach to labor market realities. This approach has tended to promote the attitude that the high unemployment rates of women are an incurable and unregrettable fact of nature, and has also tended to bias policy discussions in a direction that leads to the toleration of overall slack and puts low or zero emphasis on the labor market problems of women. Abstracting from issues of age and race, we may characterize the usual target correction methodology as starting with the estimation of a simple relationship between women's and men's unemployment rates (U, and U,,) such as