The National Republican Congressional Committee has been meeting with standing Republican officials to teach them how to be more sensitive toward women to try to gain women’s votes, according to a report from POLITICO.

Essentially, Republican leaders are taking classes on how to not be jerks to women because someone has started to notice that it really hurts on election night when you’ve alienated the majority of women. This training is laughable at best, pretty offensive and is too small of an effort that is way too late.

When the POLITICO report came out, Speaker of the House John Boehner urged his fellow Republicans to “be a little more sensitive” when running against women.  The training sessions with the NRCC specifically dealt with messaging against women opponents.

“When you look around the Congress,” Boehner said, “there are a lot more females in the Democrat caucus than there are in the Republican caucus.”

First of all, guys, don’t ever refer to women as “females.” We are not a species; we are not animals. We are women.

Second of all, it’s not just the way Republican men are talking to the Democrat women running against them. It’s what they are saying and doing to all women.

The push for being more sensitive toward women comes after several incidents in 2012 left women stunned. Republican Senator Todd Akin lost his own Ohio race after he claimed women could not become pregnant from “legitimate rape.”

“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

In the 2012 Indiana Senate race, candidate Richard Murdock claimed rape was divine intervention and said “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.” After such a statement, he clearly lost, as well.

Of course claiming that only some rapes count and all of them were gifts from God anyway is going to alienate women. But taking a course that teaches you to say these things in a nicer way is not going to trick women into voting for you.

Quite honestly, it’s not an issue of lack of sensitivity. Women don’t need you to be sensitive with them. Women need to be treated with respect, not kid gloves. Sensitivity and respect are not the same thing.

I’m not sure if standing members of the Republican Party just think women can’t tell the difference between the two, or if they actually believe that women don’t deserve to be treated with the same respect they show to men.

Either way, lack of sensitivity is not why women are running from the Republican Party. Yes, the Akins and Murdocks of the GOP lost them some votes and clearly those were insensitive things to say.

But these men weren’t just saying these things. They were putting policies forth to back up what Akin really meant when he brought up “legitimate rape”: ‘if a woman gets pregnant, she just a lying slut who wasn’t really raped.’

It is anti-women policies that are losing Republicans votes from women. Policies that close Planned Parenthood clinics that provide health care to women; Policies that try to keep all women from having equal access to birth control; Policies that would ban abortions in any situation, even if a woman’s life depended upon having a fetus removed from her body; Policies that try to redefine rape and make seeking justice for sexual crimes even more difficult than it already is.

If the Republican Party wants votes from women who can think for themselves and recognize they deserve rights, the party is going to have to stop trying to take women’s rights away from them.