Ladies: Texas Governor Rick Perry is not your friend. Last month, he vowed to spend every single day of this year’s legislative session fighting against reproductive choice, and it’s so far so good thanks to the state’s definitive decision to cut Planned Parenthood out of the state’s health program for low-income women.
So it’s disconcerting that 60 percent of Perry’s 256 office employees are female. We’re not just talking administrative work, either; two-thirds of his most senior staffers are women.
He told the Texas Tribune that “no one should be shocked” by his hiring decisions:
“I live every day with four strong women,” he said, referring to his wife, Anita, his daughter, Sydney, and his two dogs, Rory and Lucy.
And it just so happens, he added, that this particular staff lineup “is probably the most experienced, capable and knowledgeable group of people working around me since I started.”
But he confessed that the gender makeup in his office, while meaningful, is hardly intentional.
“I looked up one day and thought, ‘That’s kind of interesting,'” he said, then turned to the lone male staffer in the room and joked, “Where are all the guys?”
The takeaway from this shouldn’t be that Perry is good for the ladies — he isn’t — but that it’s disappointing that a legislator whose political decisions so often negatively affect women has a better track record when it comes to workplace equality than our president.