Maybe more of IMHO poll, but enough election related I figured it should go here.But I don’t want to get into candidate issues, just the phrase it self because I am baffled.
I guess I am missing something. I don’t understand why the “Binders full of women” is so horrible and deserving of scorn. I work in IT and we have binders full of lots of things. We have a literal three ring binder of qualified applicants maintained by the Directors admin. If we need more people we start with the binder. I have said the exact phrase “We have a binder full of java programmers, we need to find some pl/sql folks” We also have Binders full of vendor program proposals and data in case we need to expand in some direction.
To me, having Binders full of something means you have done proper investigation, and are expecting to use the info to make a good decision/ acquire the resource type whatever. I wasn’t actually watching the debate word for word.But in general the phrase “I have Binders full of women” means to me they have investigated and prepared a set of good candidates for future opportunities, which although it may or may not be total bullshit, but seems to be a positive way to answer a question about equal employment, and I don’t get the shitstorm.
Part of it is that he implied that he had gone out of his way to find qualified women when, if fact, it was the women’s group that brought them to him unrequested. Additionally, there was the antiquated notion that women need special family time. Actually, my wife and I both work full time. We both need special family time.
It just sounds funny, in a weird way. You don’t literally have binders full of women. Women are people. They don’t fit in binders.
It came in the midst of a super patronizing answer that suggested that if we are going to let women work, we need to let them go home to make dinner, not pay them the same as men.
As others have said, there were factual errors in what Romney said. He didn’t tell his staff to seek out women. An outside group came to him and asked him to hire more women. So it wasn’t a Romney initiative as he claimed.
It’s also untrue that he actually hired more women. Overall, the administrations before and after his hired more women.
Romney said there was an independent university study that said his administration hired a higher percentage of women in important jobs than other states. But the study was self-administered. Each administration was able to designate its own list of what jobs were “important” and the Romney administration chose to include a higher percentage of jobs women had been appointed to.
Finally, there was the implication that Romney supposedly needed somebody to go out and find him qualified women to appoint to government offices. Romney was 55 years old and had a decades-long history of working in private business and public service. So why didn’t he already have his own list of qualified women that he had been working with in the past?
The impression it created was that Romney had been living in a 1950’s mindset and only found out in 2002 that women were capable of doing real jobs.
You are missing the fact that there is no outrage. We are mocking Romney for a goofy expression that makes him look silly. We are laughing at Romney’s expense. Unlike Republicans, not all unfavorable impressions of our opponents indicate hatred and outrage.
I’m only one data point, and I don’t even get to vote in this country, but that’s what pissed me off. You’re a very successful guy who’s been working forever - how do you not already have connections with some qualified women you’d want to hire? It’s bullshit. You shouldn’t need to go to a “women’s group” to find women. Everyone knows women. It’s not like he was saying he needed to find a very qualified Dutch midget albino sculptor with CSS experience. Women make up half of the damn population. The fact that it seemed to be such a difficult thing for him makes me think that he and the men he associates with only know the sort of women who bring them slippers and a martini and serve them a pot roast when they get home from work every day. Not successful women who work outside the home and try to upstage their rich husbands.
^ This. Seriously, he’s been working for decades in business and doesn’t, on his own, know ANY qualified women?
What I get from that is that women are invisible to him. He just doesn’t see that they exist all around him, doesn’t see what they do, what they accomplish, and that they are doing the same work as men.
It’s a really horrible turn of phrase and therefore is easy to mock.
The real problems with the answer were that:
not only did he not know of any qualified women, neither did any of the people he surrounded himself with. There were apparently no women on his team already, so he didn’t work toward gender diversity in his pre-government work and the culture he promoted was also full of people who were completely comfortable with gender exclusiveness.
he claimed to have promoted a flexible work schedule so that the women could cook dinner and be at home with children. So, either all of the men on his staff were child-free or he thinks of childcare and housekeeping as “women’s work” and sees issues related to children as women’s issues rather than parent issues. That’s doesn’t speak well to me about where he stands on gender equality.
the answer also really had nothing to do with equal pay
post debate, it was found that he did not go seeking the lists of qualified women. Instead, a group came to him with the list. He wasn’t proactive about it at all.
also post debate, it was found that while he started out with some moves toward a more balanced staff, the number of women in appointed positions declined from when he first took office to when he left.
Pretty much what amarinth said. I wasn’t outraged by the “binders” comment, I just thought it was funny. I mean really, binders! Full of women! It’s gold, Jerry, gold!
If I was going to get outraged it would probably be over the whole line of thinking that women need to get home to cook dinner, or that Romney will so lift the economy that employers will even hire (gasp) women, but “outrage” would imply that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Sadly, Romney being Romney, I had no problem believing what I was hearing from him.
In fact, the version I saw shared most widely among my (mostly liberal) facebook friends mocked Bill Clinton as much as Romney. (Photo of Clinton over caption: “Wait… tell me more about these binders.”)
The reason its humor took off was how telling it was as a comment about his mindset. How much it confirmed the worst thoughts about him in regards to women’s issues.
The people who were qualified were not women, are not women. One needs to go out and search special to find adequate people who are females. He (in his false version of events) had that special effort made. Note: the question was about inequity of pay; his answer reveals that he believes the inequity of pay is because women as a whole are not as qualified as males. But we males can be generous and hire them anyway.
People are the data in the binders. It ties in with the image of the Bain corporate raider concerned with the numbers, firing people, outsourcing so on. No one likes being objectified and thought of as a data point and nothing more; some women perhaps are a bit more sensitized to objectification than some males are. It’s nice to be thought of as human beings instead.
His thinking is illustrated by his use of that odd image. It is not odd to him. It is how he really thinks, what he believes.
When I first heard him say “binders full of women”, I thought ‘wow, mitt’s going to be a pimp from the 50’s’ (who uses binders instead of a database in the business world?)
Next thought, I bet he was actually looking to lower his payroll budget (because the answer was in response to equal pay and he never actually said he was for equal pay and was so cheap that he used binders instead of a database).
Then he followed it up with women need flextime (an excuse that was widely used to justify lower pay for women doing the same work - they were unreliable and always quit to go off and have kids).
Then he topped all that off with implying that he’d cause the economy to come back so strong that employers will be desperate for workers, so desperate that they’ll even hire women. (but still no mention of equal pay)
So, I’d put myself on the miffed side at the time the statements were made. And I’m loving how it has gone viral. It is a nice, collective “kiss my arse” to Romney.