Cannot render circumflex

The following Markdown snippet contains a circumflex but it is discarded in the conversion to roff. There does not appear to be a way to render a circumflex.

`
ronn < test.md > test.1
`

The circumflex is discarded. test.md contains:

test - render a circumflex
=========================

## DESCRIPTION

We are trying to render a circumflex.

y = 2^x
