Top Republican Strategist: GOP ‘Doesn’t Give Equal Opportunity To Women’

During a segment on women’s evolving roles in the workplace on Meet the Press Sunday morning, GOP political operative and former McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt made a compelling case for equal opportunity in American businesses and the country at large, asserting that organizations that do not afford women a place at the table are on the wrong side of history and will, eventually, lose out.

Schmidt also extended the criticism as far as his own party, pointing out that Republicans face an institutional disadvantage due to their lack of female leaders and poor outreach to women:

SCHMIDT: I think in any organization where women are not at the table, where it is skewed male in today’s day and age, that’s an organization that’s deficient. That’s an organization that’s going to have problems. It’s one of the problems we have structurally in the Republican Party. We don’t have enough women at the table. But any company, any organization in today’s day and age that doesn’t give equal opportunity to women, that doesn’t advance women to the table, is going to be an organization that has difficulty competing.

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While women have indeed made enormous strides in the last several decades, they remain hamstrung by the legacies of institutional sexism. And Schmidt is certainly correct to point out the contemporary GOP’s woes with women — out of the record 20 women currently in the Senate, only four are Republicans. President Obama handily carried women voters in the 2012 election, thanks in large part to horrific comments about rape and the Republican Party’s overall decidedly anti-women policies.