Romney: “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.” FACTCHECK.
昨天第二轮总统选举辩论中,落幕泥为了在女性选民中拉票,表示他对女性的亲和性,提到他在麻省刚刚出任州长组阁时没见一个妇女干部,于是派人四处搜寻,启动一个妇女领导班子认定和推荐的系统,找到了合格的女干部加盟他的州政府。当时参与推荐女性领导的当事人戴维.伯恩斯坦披露,事实并非像落幕泥说的那样,而是,麻省妇女领导群体的认定早在落幕泥组阁之前就已经进行,而非由落幕泥开始。而落幕泥在从商从政多年经营之后,仍然不认识一个“合格“的妇女领导,还需要别人来推荐这本身就说明了问题。而且事实是在他当州长的几年内,他班子里妇女工作人员的人数不断降低。那么他真的能获得女选民的支持吗?
Mind The Binder
Hey, I know about that binder! And guess what -- Mitt Romney was lying about it.
From the rush transcript:
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.
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.
I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I've checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I've just presented it is correct -- and that Romney's claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.
I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, 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. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)
Third, note that in Romney's story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn't know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?
Binders full of women memes