By now you are probably tired of hearing about Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment. It was in answer to a question about equal pay for women, which he never answered.

The entire transcript of the second presidential debate is on the ABC news website if you want to look for the whole context. A search for ‘binders’ will find the part of the transcript with that question and related answers.

I don’t find the phrase itself that damaging. After all it is probably just that he left out a few words that would have made it sound a bit more reasonable. I’m pretty sure he meant something like ‘binders of women’s applications’ or “folders with resumes of qualified women” but that is not what came out of his mouth.

It is a rather uncomfortable image, “binders of women”. Brings me back to my school days of over 40 years ago. We had loose leaf binders, usually with metal rings for 2 or 3 hole paper. I won’t complete my thought but it does seem rather painful.

There is an interesting column in the Patch called Is Mitt Romney a Real Life Don Draper?. I don’t totally agree but the Mad Men image is a good one. I don’t think his attitude is that the workplace should be like on Mad Men but he certainly has an out of date attitude about women.

But one thing that did stick me as a throwback to the Mad Men days was that Governor Romney could not find any qualified women working for the state. Mitt Romney was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, not 1962. I would have thought there should have been qualified women working for the state. Of course it would make sense to reach out to expand the pool of qualified women. But his staff could find no qualified women among the state employees. Seems odd to me.