Beyond Mitt's Binders: Women Lost the Debate

By now you've probably seen some snarky jokes about Romney's "binders full of women" comment, but that wasn't the only thing making feminists cringe in last night's debate. Romney's entire answer on pay equity "was pretty amazingly retrograde," writes Matthew Yglesias at Slate. "If you're going to have women in the workforce … sometimes they need to be more flexible," Romney said, explaining that female staffers had to be home early to make dinner for their kids. Here's a novel idea: "Maybe dad should cook dinner!" Equality demands that some moms be able to take jobs with inflexible schedules.

• Janice D'Arcy at the Washington Post, meanwhile, is fuming over Romney's gun violence response, in which he said having more married parents would solve the problem. Obama said he agreed. But research shows that education and income level are a heck of a lot more important than your parents' marital status. Unmarried mothers, D'Arcy writes "are not a monolithic voting bloc and neither are they a monolithic punching bag."
• Then there was the treatment of Candy Crowley, who was often ignored or talked over. "Since both candidates are trying to convince voters that they respect women, they might start by respecting Candy Crowley," tweeted Nicholas Kristof.
• One Romney adviser today confirmed that Romney would not have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. "He was opposed to it at the time," Ed Gillespie said, according to the Huffington Post. But he added that Romney wouldn't repeal the law, either.

(More presidential debate stories.)