Mitt Romney caused quite a stir among women voters after last week’s presidential debate.

During the second presidential debate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney used the phrase “binders full of women” when answering a question about equality of pay for women in the workplace.

He also talked about women needing to have flexible work schedules. This soon went viral.

Romney received a lot of criticism from the female population and was accused of being insensitive towards women’s equality and going back in time to the 1950s. 

Romney said he “had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men,” and as a result, he then went out in search of qualified women to fill those positions.

The “binders full of women” comment that came moments later was in reference to binders that were filled with women who were qualified to be placed in these high positions he was trying to fill. 

In a number of people’s opinion, Romney worded certain things insensitively during the debate.

Does this one string of comments, though, make Romney sexist or insensitive towards women all together? For some women, that answer is still up for debate.

“I don’t think women want to be given special privileges. We just want an even playing field,” said Shaleka Griffin, a senior kinesiology major. 

Romney went on to talk about how his chief of staff couldn’t stay late at the office because she said she had to be able to be home in time to cook for her kids and to be with them.

Some people took that offensively and saw it as Romney saying women needed flexible hours so they could go home and cook.

“I think that what he said on TV made him sound sexist, but if you really think about what he was talking about, he had a legitimate point as far as women needing more flexible hours,” said Lauren Arnold, a senior elementary education major. 

Are people being overly sensitive and not paying attention to what really matters in the debates?

“You’re just looking for an argument on that one,” said Charlotte Farshian, a senior criminal justice major, of people offended by his wording.

“As far as women go, what he said was right. Not everyone is going to not want kids and just work, work, work all the time. People want to have families,” said Farshian about Romney’s flexible hours for women.

Most people agreed that Romney’s word choice was poor and that the way he said certain things was what offended a lot of women the most.