Late Night Thang — Binders? WTF?

Fact Check by the Boston Globe:

During the second presidential debate, Mitt Romney touted his efforts to hire women as governor of Massachusetts.

“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.”

Romney, however, did not have a history of appointing women to high-level positions in the private sector. Romney did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.

The venture capital and private equity fields were male-dominated, to be sure, especially during Romney’s time. Women started to break into the upper echelons of the firm after it started a hedge fund, called Brookside in 1996.

Today, 4 of out of 49 of the firm’s managing directors in the buyout area are women.

Romney’s record on hiring women as a governor was much better. In February 2004, 10 of the 20 top positions in Romney’s administration were filled by women, including lieutenant governor Kerry Healey.

Uh, plus this:

… 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.)

Additional fact checking on the story from Raw Story can be found here.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s story about having “binders full of women” brought to him while assembling his Massachusetts state cabinet years ago is not true, according to a Boston Phoenix report Wednesday morning.

While Romney did get a binder listing qualified female candidates after being elected governor in 2003, reporter David S. Bernstein said, it was assembled not by his staff, but by a coalition of groups led by the bipartisan Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, which started collecting the information in 2002 as part of the Massachusetts Government Appointments Project (MassGAP).

“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,” Bernstein said. “They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.”

Binders of women? REALLY? REALLY? I mean REALLY?

Talk amongst yourselves cause it’s a post debate thread!