In the debate Mitt Romney heartily endorsed Affirmative Action, claiming he sought out “binders full of women” that he could put in high positions. And it turns out that even that was a lie. Sheesh.
In the second presidential debate Tuesday Mitt Romney came prepared with ammunition in case issues of equality in the workplace for women was brought up. Romney said, “I had the chance to pull together a Cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men,” he said. “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.”
So now the facts are beginning to emerge. And once again the facts differ from what Romney said.
According to Maria Cardona writing at CNN,
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.
Again: The percentage of women in senior positions went down under Romney. Romney undermined the gains women had made.
But Wait There’s More
Turns out that Romney didn’t even ask aides to look for qualified women as he said in his prepared statement at the debate, women’s groups brought the binders to him. He did not go to a number of women’s groups as he claimed. He did not ask for the binders. They came to him, he did not seek them out.
He just plain lied about it, in an attempt to get votes from women.
But Wait There’s More
Before Romney was elected governor he ran a company called Bain Capital. And what was his record on women there? The Boston Globe looked into this, in Fact check: Romney’s record of hiring women,
Romney, however, did not have a history of appointing women to high-level positions in the private sector. Romney did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.
The venture capital and private equity fields were male-dominated, to be sure, especially during Romney’s time.
No women, male-dominated.
But wait, it gets even worse. At Huffington Post, Christina Wilkie writes in, Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don’t Want To Work There,
In 1994, when Romney challenged the late Sen. Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe first raised the question of why there were so few women and minorities employed at Bain Capital Partners, the Boston-based private equity group Romney founded. At the time, all 95 vice presidents of the firm were white, and only nine were women.
All white, only 9 women out of 95. (Bain still all white, by the way, no Hispanic or African Americans.)
And as for those “binders of women” Romney said he asked for?
But as Romney revealed Tuesday night, eight years after Kennedy’s brutal attack, Romney still hadn’t met or worked with enough women to prepare him to staff the governor’s office with capable people.
“It’s shocking to me that after 25 years of experience at the very highest levels of corporate America, Mitt Romney needed our help [to find qualified women],” Jesse Mermell, one of the women who helped prepare the “binders full of women” told HuffPost’s Jen Bendery on Wednesday.
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