Why Carly's Exit Is No Feminist Issue
She came, she conquered, and couldn't control the consequences. All the while, Carly Fiorina was just another CEO driven by the greed of her board and shareholders, all dedicated to the proposition of improving the bottom line. A hired hand, she failed at the very game she sought to master.
Fiorina's gender was irrelevant to her performance, although some would have held her to a higher, gentler standard because she has ovaries. But one of her first acts was to eliminate flextime at Hewlett-Packard, thus forcing many single mothers to quit their jobs in order to take care of their children. She destroyed many of the caring, "paternalistic" practices instigated by founders Hewlett and Packard, both men who cared not only about business but also about the welfare and happiness of their employees.
It just goes to show that some men are more like the way we think of women, and vice versa. Lawrence Summer notwithstanding, nurture can be a more powerful influence on behavior than nature.
I think you're right. When she became CEO, I thought: Good luck. Succeeding with what HP had and what the market was doing at that point, in my opinion, was very unlikely.
The story reminds me a little bit of Computervision, a CAD/CAM company I used to work with -- a woman named Kathy Cote became CEO just as the company was about to be eclipsed by a new generation of products, and there was just no catching up. (She actually did a very respectable job considering the circumstances).
I remember listening to Kathy on a quarterly conference call with Wall St. analysts, and I was shocked at how snide and disrespectful some of the analysts were. I think it was only the second time I had listened to one of these calls (this was about 15 years ago). I suddenly thought, Nobody escapes; everybody's got some jerk to report to ;)
Posted by: Lisa Williams | February 11, 2005 at 06:48 AM
I don't know if her ouster had much to do with her gender, but I'd say the media coverage subsequent to that ouster is influenced by it.
Posted by: Elisa Camahort | February 11, 2005 at 06:05 PM