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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don't Want To Work There
But Tuesday night wasn't the first time the Republican presidential candidate has gotten into trouble trying to explain how difficult it is for him to find "qualified" women for senior positions.
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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1974837.html
Skittles
(153,226 posts)Initech
(100,108 posts)nolabear
(41,999 posts)jackbenimble
(251 posts)And possibly investment in the company? Oh, maybe to be a venture capitalist you basically have to buy your title with an investment in the firm, then you get to reap an extra large paycheck?
Care Acutely
(1,370 posts)I guess they didn't have room in their pretty little heads after all that dinner planning and wifely dutyin' and all.
Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)So a 1995 graduating class has nothing to do with current VPs at Bain. 1994 VPs would have graduated many years before then. Then they also have to have experience in that type of business, private equity. I would believe that that type of business doesn't attract many women.
I don't know about minorities, but it wouldn't surprise me that not many minorities went to HBS and started a career in private equity. I think of it as something you're sort of raised to think about. Coming from a family that has ties to those sorts of businesses.