Mitt Romney’s ‘binders full of women’

The minute Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said the phrase, social media exploded. 

Romney said the phrase while answering a question that first went to President Barack Obama about inequalities in the workplace and fair pay for women. Obama answered the question by focusing on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which he signed into law.

Romney took a different route in answering the question. He talked about his time as Massachusetts governor and how he wanted to hire some women – and not all men – for his cabinet.

“And – and so we – we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Romney needed help finding women for posts. There were no women in at the top of the all-male Bain Capital. “Binders Full Of Women” was certainly an awkward phrase to say and it failed to even work as an answer to the question. Instead, it reminded people of a time when women wore girdles or women in China bound their feet as status symbol that allowed them to marry into money. For some, it sounded like a great idea for a Halloween costume.

And like Big Bird, it became an instant meme.

Romney then went a bit patriarchal, reminding me of the Dabney Coleman character in the 1980s movie, “9 to 5.”

“Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.”

He continued, saying that his chief of staff couldn’t work late because she had to be home “making dinner” and “being with them when they get home from school.”

Romney said, “Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.”

Do fathers not have to get home and cook dinner? Do they not want to be there for their children when school is out? After all, there are such things as single dads who balance children and work. Mitt Romney has obviously been watching too many episodes of “Leave It To Beaver” on TV Land on the campaign trail. The days of Donna Reed are long over, Mr. Romney.

Romney seemed to time travel again to the 1950s when he was addressing a question about assault weapons, specifically AK-47s.

“We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids,” Romney said. “Wherever possible the – the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that’s not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea.”

Obama talked seriously about contraception in health care plans, Planned Parenthood, and fair pay, and such a discussion was desperately needed.

“Women are increasingly the breadwinners in the family,” Obama said. “This is not just a women’s issue, this is a family issue, this is a middle-class issue, and that’s why we’ve got to fight for it.”

But few will remember any of that tomorrow because “binders full of women” already has its own Twitter account.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/10/17/mitt-romneys-binders-full-of-women/

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Romney’s empty ‘binders full of women’

…In fairness, “binders” was most likely a slip of the tongue. But Romney said it in an effort to obfuscate and pivot from the issue at hand: equality for women. He avoided the real question, and that, and his remark, spoke volumes.

Even as a slip of the tongue, this odd phrase betrays Romney’s true lack of understanding, knowledge and comfort level on women’s equality. And besides the binders comment, there are several problems with the story Romney told Tuesday night.

First of all, it is not true. The “binder” of women’s résumés was prepared before the election by the Massachusetts Government Appointments Project, a coalition of nonpartisan women’s groups. When Romney won, the women — not in binders — gave him the résumés.

Romney told that story in an effort to demonstrate how well his administration had done in hiring women. Except it didn’t. A study by the University of Massachusetts and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy shows that the percentage of women in senior positions during his tenure actually declined. It went from 30% when Romney took office to 27% when he left and up to more than 33% after the new governor took over.

Also, it boggles the mind that throughout his decades-long career in business, Romney had not come across any qualified women he could appoint to his Cabinet. The Romney campaign points to longtime aide Beth Myers, but she was not in the Cabinet.

The more reasonable explanation is that diversity of gender, or any kind of diversity, was never an important tenet of corporate leadership for Romney. Which is why he did not proactively seek out the “binders full of women”: Women’s groups, in fact, came looking for him.

All of this goes to the heart of why Romney has had such a hard time winning over the women’s vote. He answered the audience member’s question from the standpoint of a detached CEO who knew that he had to find qualified women to serve in his administration come hell or high water, given the vast disparity between men and women holding management positions. He must have known he would be blasted if he didn’t do it. In this day and age, this should be a no-brainer. You should not ask the American people to give you a medal for hiring qualified women.

The dissonance when it comes to the governor and women went even further at the debate. Romney not only couldn’t answer the question about women’ equality, he could not even answer a question about outlawing AK-47s without bringing up single mothers. Saying he did not believe in changing gun laws, he seemed to equate children raised by single parents with the “culture of violence.” I may be wrong, but I don’t think that is a good strategy to get struggling single moms to vote for you.

President Obama, in contrast, answered the equality question not just from a personal standpoint as a father but also as a commander in chief who signed a bill into law that guaranteed women could receive equal pay for equal work, the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Romney conspicuously never said whether he supported that act. The president’s approach was much more in synch with what women want to hear and with what all Americans know to be fair.

The binders comment was even more unfortunate for Romney in that he said it in the midst of Obama’s very strong showing. The president clearly showed that he had the fight, the passion and the commitment to continue to work for middle-class voters — on jobs, on health care, on taxes, on education, on immigration and, yes, on women’s issues…

By Maria Cardona, Special to CNN

Maria Cardona is a Democratic strategist, a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and former communications director for the Democratic National Committee.

Sorce: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/17/opinion/cardona-binders-women/index.html