Last updated on February 7th, 2013 at 05:23 pm
Binder Blunder continues.
Obama for America Senior Strategist David Axelrod told Piers Morgan Wednesday night that under Governor Romney, “(T)he percentage of women in senior state government positions declined.” But what about the binders!? Axelrod explained that the binders were also nowhere to be seen at Bain, “If you look at the business that he ran before he was Governor, they had no women at a senior level, they had no women partners.”
Romney said the reason there were no women at Bain is because,’It’s a profession that has yet to attract many women and minorities’ but at the time (in 1995), almost 30% of the Harvard Business School were women.
Watch here:
AXELROD: I think the “binders for women” formulation was an awkward formulation, but the point the Governor was making was that he couldn’t find qualified women and so he reached out. It turns out that an organization gave him the particular binder with resumes of women, but I’m not surprised that he needed the help because if you look at the business that he ran before he was Governor, they had no women at a senior level, they had no women partners.
He explained at the time that, well you know, business schools aren’t graduating more than a handful of women. Actually at the time Harvard Business School was 25 or 30 percent of their graduates were women and Governor Romney apparently didn’t reach out for the binders then when he was trying to staff his own business. It’s also true as it turns out that his record was no better and maybe worse than the previous administration in Massachusetts. So I’m less concerned about his awkward construction and what it might say about his attitudes than I am about his record, which is poor and it’s reflected in the policies that he is advocating today.
Those binders full of women were apparently a new idea for Romney, since he didn’t implement them in his private sector company. The Boston Globe reported, “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.”
Back in 1994, Romney tried to defend the lack of women at Bain. He said that there weren’t enough to pick from at the elite business schools from which they recruited, because women and minorities weren’t “attracted” to making a ton of money private equity.
‘It’s a profession that has yet to attract many women and minorities,’ he said. Romney acknowledged that Bain & Co. and Bain Capital do not have affirmative action programs or an organized outreach to minorities and women. He said the Bain consulting firm in particular recruited from the elite business schools, which, he said, graduate only a handful of minorities and women.” [Boston Globe, 5/9/94]
Too bad he didn’t have a super big binder full of women to pick from, alas, the business schools were empty he tells us. But if you’ve learned anything this election cycle, you’ve learned that if Governor Romney tells you he asked for some binders, he most likely did not ask for some binders.
So it follows that the 1995 class of Harvard Business School was almost 30% women. So much for Romney’s claim that the elite schools only graduated a “handful” of women. To be fair to Governor Romney, perhaps they all wanted to go home to make dinner.
So what about those binders at the governor’s office? Not only did Romney not initiate the binders, contrary to what he told Americans in Tuesday night’s debate, but it turns out that “women at the end of the Romney administration did not hold a higher percentage of senior-level positions than when he took office.”
Hypocrite you say? No. It dovetails very well with Romney’s no single women policy. You see, if you gals have jobs in business, then there might be single mothers and you know what means for gun violence.
Tsk. If only you women were “attracted” to making tons of money, you wouldn’t be victims and then there would be no need for welfare.
(In reality, gun violence is attributed to poverty levels, not single parenthood as alleged by Romney.)
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