Christina Wilkie tells us Mitt Romney's problems with women and minorities goes back a whole lot further than when he was Governor of Massachusetts where he needed special "binders full of women" provided by outside groups to try to find qualified women for state positions.
In her article, Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don't Want To Work There, she reports all of Bain's 95 vice presidents were white and only 9 were women, and Bain had no affirmative action plan until after he left. Even today there appear to be no Latino or African American members of the 164 member Bain private equity team.
In 1994, when Romney challenged the late Sen. Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe first raised the question of why there were so few women and minorities employed at Bain Capital Partners, the Boston-based private equity group Romney founded. At the time, all 95 vice presidents of the firm were white, and only nine were women.
Romney's answer at the time was similar to the one he gave Tuesday night, that there simply weren't any female applicants. He blamed the profession, private equity, and said it didn't "attract many women and minorities." He also blamed the elite business schools, from which Bain recruited almost exclusively. Those schools, he told the Globe, "graduate only a handful of minorities and women."
Statistics suggest otherwise. In 1995, a year after Romney made his comment, the Harvard Business School graduating class was almost 30 percent women. And given the enormous potential of private equity to generate wealth, it's difficult to imagine that women and minorities simply wouldn't be "attracted" to the profession.
In 1994, Senator Kennedy's campaign created an ad saying that "Romney claims 'only a handful of women' meet his recruiting standard." Wilkie reports that Romney lost to Kennedy among women voters "by more than two-to-one."
What's going on with Mitt Romney and his attitudes towards women and minorities?
We need to get the message out to women voters that Mitt Romney and the Republicans are not their best choice, and never have been.