Ann Friedman supports having "binders full of women":
The binder of women was assembled by women and pushed onto Romney’s desk, unsolicited. When we mock Romney’s reliance on it, we’re actually mocking a concerted strategy by an accomplished group of women to diversify their state government. Oops.
The binder-full-of-names approach is a time-honored way of getting people (mostly men, sure, but also women) in positions of power to do more than pay lip service to the idea of diversity. In my own industry, I got so sick of hearing male editors say over and over that they didn’t know or couldn’t find any great women journalists, so I created an online compendium of recent work by women. A digital binder full of women journalists, if you will. I have no idea if editors have turned to it when they’re looking to assign articles, but I do know that its very existence disproves a classic excuse for lack of gender balance in magazine bylines. It answers a very stupid but persistent question: Where are the women writers? Right here, in this binder that I can show to you.
Douthat follows up:
There have been plenty of moments during this campaign cycle when Romney delivered some line or another that really did fit the caricature that Democrats have been sketching of him, with the famous “47 percent” monologue being the most deservedly devastating example. But the “binders full of women” line was nothing remotely like this. Instead, it was an amusingly maladroit phrase that was woven into a full-on pander to exactly the kind of concerns that liberals are often more likely than conservatives to argue that politicians should address — concerns about workplace diversity, female advancement, the glass ceiling, work-life balance, you name it.
He goes on to argue that "real problem with Romney’s comments about workplace and family issues is that (as is so often the case) there wasn’t any policy meat on the bone." Recent Dish on Romney's binder comment here.
(Bindr visual from Nerve.)
The Dish 
