#bindersfullofwomen

That phrase used by Mitt Romney last night at the Hofstra University debate has become the focus of a whole cottage industry of Romniana (sub-heading: "Unintentionally Revealing Word Choices Committed by the Man Who Would Be President").

The Daily Beast has a general accounting of how the meme blew up on the InnerTubes last night, along with some factual background on those "binders full of women." Turns out that Romney didn't ask for those binders. They were pushed on him by women looking for top-level government jobs.

Marlow Stern summed up Mr. Romney's problem with women in the Daily Beast article linked above:

...at Bain Capital, which Romney ran for 15 years until 1999, there are only seven women among the company’s 87 managing directors and senior executives, or 8 percent, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, falling ever-so-slightly below the national average of 8.1 percent. 

Romney dug the knife in further re: women’s issues when he later chose to share an anecdote about one of his female employees. 

“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.” 

The notion that women need flexibility from their male employer (Romney) so they can be home in time to cook dinner for their family is June Cleaver–antiquated, to say the least.