I don’t think too many women liked what they heard from Mitt Romney last night. Everyone is laughing about his “binders full of women” line, but that was just one piece of a very disturbing performance. It’s nice that he had a woman as chief of staff but being chief of staff to a governor is not the kind of job where you get to leave at 4 o’clock so you can get home to cook your kids’ dinner. That’s just not plausible. That’s not what flex-time is about. There are women all throughout our workforce who are working long hours and flex-time helps them juggle their family obligations with their job requirements. It’s helps men do this, too. But a decent chief of staff works harder and longer hours than the executive that they serve. You don’t send her home early to feed the kids. Either the story is just made up, it’s grossly exaggerated, or Romney was a lousy governor who quit working mid-afternoon. Come to think of it, that may be why he didn’t even try to get reelected.
It wasn’t much better when Romney answered a question about the status of the Assault Weapons Ban by saying that he doesn’t support any new laws but that gun violence would drop if women stopped having babies out of wedlock. “Guns don’t kill people, single mothers kill people.”
Romney wouldn’t say that he supported equal pay for women. He lied about his record on contraception. He lied about asking for the binders of women. He still wants to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He still supports overturning Roe v. Wade.
I just don’t think women felt like Romney understands or respects them.