This transpired earlier this evening at Hofstra University.
CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?
ROMNEY: Thank you. And important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.
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?”
The man shows his condescension here. Is this Mad Men, or the 21st century? Unless he thinks his staff were all misogynists, in which he should have said he reprimanded them for their obvious lies. (Then—it was he who hired his staff in the first place.) He’s implying that they had to lower the bar and go all affirmative action in order to get his binders.
ROMNEY: And — and so we — 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.
[…]
Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. 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.
Once again, is this Leave It to Beaver? What the hell? Shouldn’t fathers also be home for dinner, and not just mothers? I’m particularly offended by this, as my wife suffers from an on-the-job injury and dinner is often as not us ordering in, or a Newman’s Own skillet, or mac’n’cheese, or driving down to Micky D’s for a stockpile of nuggets…
Also, if he had so much respect for women, he wouldn’t have disrespected Candy Crowley so much tonight.