U.S.News & World Report Tumblelog

All funny memes aside, was there any truth to Romney’s “binders full of women” statement?

Those ‘Binders Full of Women’? Turns Out Romney Didn’t Commission Them, Compile Them, or Pay Particular Attention to Them

According to Bernstein, there was in fact a “binder full of women,” but it wasn’t commissioned or compiled by Romney or his aides — it was put together by a collective of Massachusetts women’s organizations called MassGAP before the 2002 election. MassGAP’s goal was to get more women into cabinet positions irrespective of which party won the election. “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,” writes Bernstein. “They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.” After flipping through it, Romney did truthfully appoint a commendable number of women to senior-level positions in his cabinet (42 percent overall), but, as Bernstein notes, “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.”