polyh3dron
Banned
From the Rush Transcript of the 10/16/12 Presidential Debate regarding a "binder" Mitt Romney apparently came up with in order to hire more women in his staff:
According to this article:
tl;dr: Mitt says he had womens' groups bring "binders of women" who were qualified to work on his staff because he wanted women to be better represented in his staff. Insinuated he and his staff commissioned the binders. In reality, said binders were commissioned prior to even knowing who would be elected as governor and were presented to him after he was elected. He hired many women from the binders to departments he he didn't care about and positions where they didn't do anything. Over his term, senior-level appointed female staff positions declined from 30% before taking office to 27.6 when he left.
So Mitt told yet another completely disingenuous whopper to the American Public on national TV. But apparently Mitt and only Mitt has license to do so.
CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?
ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.
And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?"
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.
I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.
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.
According to this article:
Not a true story.
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. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.
They did the research and 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.
...according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn't care about -- and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about -- budget, business development, etc. -- went to women.
Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006.
tl;dr: Mitt says he had womens' groups bring "binders of women" who were qualified to work on his staff because he wanted women to be better represented in his staff. Insinuated he and his staff commissioned the binders. In reality, said binders were commissioned prior to even knowing who would be elected as governor and were presented to him after he was elected. He hired many women from the binders to departments he he didn't care about and positions where they didn't do anything. Over his term, senior-level appointed female staff positions declined from 30% before taking office to 27.6 when he left.
So Mitt told yet another completely disingenuous whopper to the American Public on national TV. But apparently Mitt and only Mitt has license to do so.