On Friday, the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., Patrice Lee Onwuka stood before a conference room of about 25 people and posed a question: How can conservatives convince more women that it’s wrong for the government to mandate paid family leave?

A man raised his hand and suggested an argument: “Do you want your kids to pay for that?” Onwuka nodded, and called on another male attendee. “Employers wouldn’t want to hire women if they have to do that,” he said. A young man in the front of the room offered another take: Paid maternity leave, he said, “presumes that a woman can’t afford to take off for herself.”

All good arguments, Onwuka said. “These mandates are costly, and they can be a backlash for women in the workforce and everything they’ve achieved,” she said. “We can expand opportunities for women in the workplace without government mandates.”

The argument for mandating paid family leave is that most women can’t afford to take extended unpaid time off from work; the policy would apply to fathers, too, so employers wouldn’t have an incentive to avoid hiring women. But those points never came up on Friday’s event on “How to Win Women,” which was hosted by the Independent Women’s Forum, where Onwuka works as a policy analyst. The point of this “activism boot camp” was to figure out how the Republican Party can stop hemorrhaging women.

Neither Onwuka nor co-moderator Ashley Carter, IWF’s director of coalitions,

mentioned this uncomfortable truth, either. Instead, they focused on convincing attendees of the importance of the female vote. Women, they noted, make up the majority of the U.S. population and of the popular vote. Since 1964, women have consistently outvoted men in state, local, and presidential elections, with the gap steadily rising, according to the Rutgers Center for American Women in Politics.