It was, to many, the moment Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election. Asked about inequality in the workplace, Romney infamously said that he had “binders full of women.” It wasn’t quite riding around in a tank looking like a total weenie, but the Internet had a field day, Romney looked like a doofus, and Obama ultimately cruised to an easy victory in 2012. But lost amid the mockery was the fact that Romney was, believe it or not, telling the truth. He really did, in fact, have binders full of women, or at least their resumes.
The Boston Globe recently located the infamous binders from a former Romney staffer, who’d stumbled over them and decided to share the 15-pound collection, three binders each, of potential appointees. State women’s groups collected the resumes in an effort to get Romney to think beyond dudes when he won the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002, beating out Shannon O’Brien for the job.
As for what happened, the Globe followed up on a few candidates, and some did in fact wind up in government jobs, although not necessarily under Romney. One applicant, Gina McCarthy, wound up running the EPA under the Obama administration. But the binders, in the end, didn’t turn out to work so well: By the time Romney left office in 2006, women made up 27.6% of the high-ranking officials in Massachusetts state government, which is a slightly lower percentage that when he took office.
(via The Boston Globe)