Binders Full Of Women…

Posted by | October 16, 2012 23:33 | Filed under: Top Stories

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By- Sarah Betancourt

A comment spawned a Facebook Page that is at 40,000 likes and growing.

Moderator Candy Crowley asked, “In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?”

Then, Mitt Romney into an anecdote about how, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he tried to get more women in his cabinet. “They brought us whole binders full of women,” Romney recalled.”

President Obama relied on his record. “The first bill I signed was something called the Lily Ledbetter bill. And it’s named after this amazing woman who had been doing the same job as a man for years, found out that she was getting paid less, and the Supreme Court said that she couldn’t bring suit because she should have found about it earlier, whereas she had no way of finding out about it. So we fixed that.”

Romney hinted that women need time to cook dinner, mentioning that his own Chief of Staff, “But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.”

Read the whole debate transcript here.

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Copyright 2012 Liberaland
By: Sarah Betancourt

Sarah Betancourt is a Boston-based journalist who has written for In These Times, Open Media Boston, Spare Change News, Boston.com, the Boston Globe Environment Blog, and has had work appear in video on the National Geographic Water Currents Blog. She writes primarily about Boston politics, labor, Generation Y issues, and environmental policy.

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