Binders Full of Women

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Part of a series on 2012 United States Presidential Election. [View Related Entries]

About

Binders Full of Women is a direct quote said by the former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney while answering a question from an audience member during the second session of the 2012 United States presidential election debates held in October 2012.

Origin

On October 16th, 2012, the second round of the U.S. presidential debate took place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. During the debate, an undecided voter by the name of Katherine Fenton asked both candidates about pay inequality for women, to which Romney replied with an anecdote about how he sought to form a gender-balanced cabinet during his governorship in Massachusetts:

“And I said, ‘Well, gosh, can’t we -- can’t we find some -- some women that are also qualified? 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."

Spread

Online Reaction

Immediately after Romney's remark went on-air, image macros captioned with Romney’s “binder” response began circulating on Twitter, as well as the launch of parody blogs Binders Full of Women on Tumblr^[2] and novelty account @RomneysBinder on Twitter.^[3]

The following day, Redditor elSpanielo submitted a post to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[15] subreddit titled “Obama doesn’t use binders,” which included an Internet Husband example featuring Barack and Michelle Obama (shown below) Within 11 hours, the post received over 11,000 up votes and 164 comments. As of October 18th, a Facebook fan page^[28] titled "Binders Full Of Women" has more than 343,000 likes.

Also on October 16th, Amazon users began writing parody reviews of various binder products^[16] sold on the site in a similar vein to Tuscan Whole Milk, Three Wolf Moon and BIC For Her Ballpoint Pens. These reviews ranged from men complaining about the lack of women in their binders (shown below, right) to women raving about the durability of the binder in which she is filed (shown below, right). Collections of these reviews were shared on news and internet culture sites including Buzzfeed^[17], TIME^[18], The Daily Beast^[19], Yahoo! News^[20], CNET^[21] and Gizmodo^[22] on October 18th.

News Media Coverage

On October 17th, yet another debate meme in the making was reported by several major news media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal,^[4]NPR,^[6] Wired,^[7] The Atlantic,^[8]CBS News^[9] and Time,^[12] who remarked in unison about the quote’s transformation into an Internet meme. Later that day, Today.com^[10] published a piece by writer Helen A.S. Popkin titled “‘Binders Full of Women,’ other Internet memes trump voter issues,” which noted the growing influence of Internet memes in political campaigns. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal^[13] interviewed Veronica De Souza, the creator of the “Binders Full of Women” Tumblr, who announced that the blog received over 11,000 followers within the first 24 hours. She went on to reveal that she hoped the success of the blog would bring her new employment opportunities, since she had been laid off from her position as a social media manager just hours prior to the debate.

Falsification of Romney's Claim

Later that same night, David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix revealed^[29] that a bipartisan women’s group called MassGAP had prepared a binder with the resumes of qualified female candidates for cabinet positions in 2002 before the gubernatorial election began.

The next day, the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus issued a statement^[30] confirming that it was the group that initiated the recruitment plan prior to the election by contacting both Mitt Romney and his opponent Shannon O’Brien. Both Bernstein's article and the group's statement were picked up by The Huffington Post^[31] and Salon^[14], which further highlighted the fact the "binders full of women" wasn't Romney's idea to begin with.

Protest in Ohio

On October 17th, Tiffany Ricci, a union organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees,^[23] scheduled a small protest in front of the Ohio Republican party's headquarters where she and four other people demonstrated against Romney's comment while dressed in binder costumes. The photos were posted on Talking Points Memo^[24] before being reshared on Liberty News Network^[25], Twitchy^[26] and political commentator Rachel Maddow's Twitter account for her television show.^[27]

BinderCon

In July 2014, New York-based womens' literary club VIDA, in collaboration with a number of other gender equality advocacy groups, launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign with a proposal to host a symposium for women and gender non-conformist writers, as well as several social media accounts on Facebook and Tumblr to promote the fundraising efforts. By September, the campaign had successfully raised $55,000 for the event. On September 22nd, 2014, a Twitter account for BinderCon,^[32] which describes itself as "a conference for/by/on women and gender non-conforming writers," was created. In less than a month, the account gained over 1,000 followers.

The conference was held at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Center on October 11th and 12th in New York and hosted by author Leigh Stein and comedian Lux Alptraum. During the conference, #BinderCon became a trending topic on Twitter,^[33] and over the course of the weekend, the hashtag was tweeted out^[54] over 5,000 times. Some of the notable speakers at the event included Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism director Emily Bell, founding editor of Jezebel Anna Holmes and former New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson, among many other guests of honor and workshop panelists.