Lynn Beisner offers her take on Mitt Romney’s ridiculous “binders full of women” comment in last night’s debate.
Affirmative action has an unlikely new advocate: Mitt Romney. Granted, I am not sure that he realized he was advocating for affirmative action during last night’s debate, but he did a better job than most professors of gender or sociology in illustrating why it is necessary, how it works, and the great outcomes it often produces.
When asked by the moderator, Candy Crowley “In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?”
Here is Mitt Romney’s reply, in full, courtesy of ABC’s transcript:
“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 went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs 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 so 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.”
Allow me to translate this from awkward Mitt-speak into English: When I became the governor of a state, I found that the recruiting system currently in place was creating an applicant pool that was disproportionately, if not entirely, male. I believed that this represented a form of gender discrimination, and so as the new Chief Executive of my state, I required that recruiters for these state jobs actively work to solicit female applications. I considered this problem with gender inequality so great that I personally approached professional women’s organizations and asked them to help me solicit female applicants for these government jobs. This affirmative action plan, which I created and implemented, was overwhelmingly successful, and it is through similar plans that I believe we will reduce the gender wage-gap.
Wow! That may not have been what Mitt Romney meant to say, but that is, in fact, exactly what he said. He said that he has mandated affirmative action, that it works, and that it should be implemented to bring about equal wages.
This shows how little we know about affirmative action—what it is and how it works. A Republican candidate for president bragged in a nationally televised debate about how he created and implemented an affirmative action plan, and he probably did not even realize what he was saying. In all of his debate prep, his team failed to recognize an affirmative action story when they heard it. And in the after-show coverage, not a single pundit called Romney’s story what it is: anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of affirmative action.
I have an internalized Republican, let’s call him “Mr. IR.” He has my ex-husband’s voice, and he argues back when I make these sort of observations. I can hear him now saying: “But Romney did not use quotas, and affirmative action is all about quotas.” To which I answer, “Will you guys quit already with the quotas? Affirmative action has never been about quotas.” And here I quote the Stanford Statement about affirmative action: “Affirmative action does not require, and does not mean, quotas or preferment of unqualified over qualified individuals.”
Mr. IR then tells me, “This is different. This is one man deciding how he wants to hire. Affirmative action is government mandated.” I smirk at Mr. IR and tell him, “Duh, Romney was the government when he made this order. What is more, he said this in a Presidential debate in answer to a question about how we solve a national problem. This was a public policy question, so his answer is that public policy should encourage or possibly demand that everyone should use affirmative action like he did when he was governor.”
Mr. IR goes on to accuse me of deliberately misinterpreting Romney and of being just another person on the liberal bandwagon of mocking Romney’s “binders full of women.” But it is true: Romney could not have chosen a more awkward way to describe how groups delivered the résumés of qualified female candidates for cabinet posts than “binders full of women.” Thankfully, the Internet has provided us with hundreds of jokes that will keep us laughing over his bizarre and strangely dehumanizing phrase for a long time.
We have also learned from an article in The Phoenix that Governor Romney’s representation of how events transpired may not have been entirely factual. It remains to be seen how this one misrepresentation along with the impressive body of mendacious statements he has made in recent months will factor into the election.
But let’s forget for a moment how awkward his phrasing was and questions about the veracity of his story. Let’s instead focus on the one truly amazing thing about this: A Republican candidate for President of the United States just portrayed affirmative action in a positive light during a national debate. That is something we should be celebrating and a position we should be holding him to.
Lynn Beisner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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