IT WAS the moment women’s issues finally took centre stage in a presidential debate, though perhaps not in the way Mitt Romney would have wanted. Within minutes of the Republican presidential candidate uttering the line about “binders full of women” in the debate, the phrase had unleashed its own hashtag, Twitter and Facebook account, and a binder full of bile from critics furious at its patronising tone.
Mr Romney used the line to demonstrate his record on pay equity for women, claiming
that when he was governor of Massachusetts he was told the only applicants for positions in his state cabinet were men.
“And I said ‘well, gosh, can’t we – can’t we find some – some women that are also qualified?’,” he said. “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.”
As well as the phrase being ripped apart on social media, Romney also found the veracity of his claim being called into question. David Bernstein of the Phoenix, a Boston newspaper, said the story Romney told was untrue.
Mr Bernstein said there was indeed an effort to find qualified women for cabinet positions, but neither Mr Romney nor his staff, nor even his party, had anything to do with it. “What actually happened was that in 2002 – prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration – a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government,” Mr Bernstein wrote.
“They . . . put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.”
Not only was Romney not involved in the effort to find qualified women, he did not pay much attention to the results, Bernstein said. A fact check in the Boston Globe on Romney’s hiring of women also found his record wanting. He did not have any women partners as chief executive of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s, it found.
– (Guardian service)