Mitt’s Binders and the Missing Women

For Mitt Romney, in the second Presidential debate, women always seemed to be elsewhere. This was not the only reason that he lost the debate—and a chance to put the election away—but it was one of them. One of the stories that Romney’s campaign has told to humanize him is about how, at Bain Capital, he once shut down the office to lead a search for the daughter of a partner after she had gone missing in New York. When he talked, on Tuesday night, about how he had “the chance to pull together a cabinet” as the governor of Massachusetts and wanted to add women, the imagery was similar, and the targets also maddeningly elusive: “all the applicants seemed to be men,” he explained. It was as if the women were runaways, deliberately hiding themselves:

And I—and I went to my staff, and I said, how come all the people for these jobs are—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 off they set. Romney did not say if his staff members were all men, but they became determined pursuers of mystery women—“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 brought us whole binders full of—of women.” “Binders full of women” is a phrase that provoked instant fascination, because it is so strange, and, as a prop and a concept, so vivid. One saw a table at which middle-aged men sat slowly leafing through pages of plastic sleeves with photographs of women tucked inside. Or, more concretely, trapped between covers, battling with metal rings.

One got the sense of Mitt Romney coming from a place where women were generally in the other room, waiting to be invited in only when the moment—or the visibility of the job—called for it. Romney was fifty-six when he became governor, with decades spent in business during which he could have made the sort of contacts that would have turned him into a resource for others looking for qualified women. The Boston Globe pointed out that Romney “did not have any women partners as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s.” Where were the binders then? The Globe added that even today, only four of Bain’s forty-nine partners are women. This is a firm he built and a culture he controlled.

(The story, according to the Boston Phoenix, was also not quite true. An outside group put together the binder. Romney didn’t put women in the most important cabinet jobs. And he had fewer and fewer working for him as time went on.)

The binders-of-women anecdote did not answer the question, which came from a woman named Katherine Fenton and was about pay. (“In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only seventy-two percent of what their male counterparts earn?”) Instead, he said that he knew women would want to leave the office earlier, to make dinner for their children, and that he thought employers could help with flexible schedules. They can, and should. But it is striking that, given an opening to talk about women in the workforce, Romney described people who either had to be dragged on to the stage or would run off of it as soon as they could. They start as a rumor and end up as an echo.

This was not the point where Obama won the debate; it was too early in the evening for that to be settled. (John Cassidy has a full account.) But it put him on the right path. The pay-equity question could hardly have been better designed for him. He talked about his mother’s work as a single parent and his grandmother’s as a bank employee who “hit the glass ceiling,” and about Lilly Ledbetter—“this amazing woman who had been doing the same job as a man for years”—and the act, bearing her name, that helped women go to court to challenge disparities. He attacked Romney for not supporting her, then moved to contraceptive coverage: “It’s an economic issue for women.”

It is also a women’s issue for women. Romney does not have an ear for that sort of thing. During the debate, he seemed to misjudge the effect of his attempts to make the moderator, Candy Crowley—the non-abstract woman in the debate—give him more time, or her willingness to fight back. Once, he traded rudeness points for the chance to make it clear that he did not, of all things, oppose “wind jobs” for Iowa. (Was that one still rattling around in his head from the caucuses?) He forced another interruption to try to explain his position on contraception, which he did ineffectively. It ended up as a jumble about how he didn’t think “that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not,” when the issue was the inclusion of coverage for contraception in insurance plans. Nor did he really make the case, as he has in the past, that religious freedom was at stake.

Romney didn’t find women where he might have, and then abruptly saw them in places, and in answers to questions, where they didn’t really fit. Asked about gun violence, he talked about single parents. He qualified this, faintly, gender-wise—“A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone”—but the great majority of single-parent households are headed by women. (Like mine.) Perhaps it would help if gay and lesbian parents could get married; this is one of many issues yet to come up in a debate. And, again, this was a question about AK-47s and assault weapons and the sort of shootings after which mothers, both married and single, become mourners. Obama, in his answer, mentioned a particular mother he’d met whose son had been wounded in the Aurora theatre shooting. Romney’s answer, in contrast, did not seem designed to slam shut the gender gap—which, leading up to this debate, he had been closing.

But one measure of the lack of intensity afforded to women’s issues by either candidate was that, while contraception was discussed, the word “abortion” did not come up at all, except maybe by proxy. Obama mentioned Planned Parenthood five times, once in the same sentence with Big Bird. A woman watching, who did not know either of the candidate’s positions going in, might have guessed the general orientation, but would not have known that Romney—at the moment—supports a ban on abortion unless a woman has been the victim of rape or incest, or will die without it. That is an extreme position. How, after all, is it supposed to work, even for a woman who has been raped? Would she have to go in front of a judge and prove that she had been raped before she could end her pregnancy? What if the alleged perpetrator claimed that the sex had been consensual—would he have an interest in contesting an abortion? Or would a woman need to prove that the risk to her life—never mind to her health—was over a certain per cent, say, seventy-five? Which bureaucrats would decide who got access to this medical procedure? There was silence about abortion in this debate, as there was in the first one, but it is not yet as deadly as the silence would be if women, as in the days before Roe, had no safe and legal access to abortions. They would be left to seek them out in streets where nobody knew them—and where some of them would die. Would Romney lead a search party to go looking for them then?

Read our complete coverage of the debates.

Photograph by Saul Loeb/Getty.