Susan Estrich
Friday, Feb. 11, 2005

Story Continues Below

  In 1978, when Katharine Graham took over The Washington Post, she was the only woman CEO in the country. When she retired in 1991, she was one of two. In 1999, there were three.

Change has come slowly. Of all of them, Carly Fiorina was the most visible and, arguably, the most powerful.

Throughout her career, Fiorina has gone out of her way to say that she has not been a victim of gender discrimination and that gender has had nothing to do with her success. Yet her career has hardly been typical in certain respects that relate very much to gender issues.

She found both a mentor and a husband at work and did not have children (she is a stepmother), and then her husband decided to take early retirement in his mid-50s in support of her career advancement, so that he could manage their household. In a sense, she was free from discrimination – in a way very few women are.

At the same time, her gender commanded both attention and scrutiny. Fiorina was a rock star in the generally staid world of business suits. Was she more colorful and charismatic because she was a woman? Would she have gotten the kind of attention she did – and later, the kind of critical scrutiny – had she been another white male MBA, even a very charming one, in a blue suit?

For better or for worse, Fiorina used all of her assets in her early days to generate excitement about herself and her company, to the consternation, even then, of some who thought she should devote more time to management.

In the end, what mattered is what always matters: stock price. The fact that her stock declined roughly 50 percent during her tenure while IBM's went down 28 percent during a comparable period is grounds for dismissal regardless of sex.

Women will continue to be viewed differently, whether they want to be or not, so long as there are so few of them. And that may be for a very long time. What is most distressing is how many men, believing the "problem" to be "over" and their own motives to be pure, have stopped paying attention to issues of gender.

"I don't pay any attention at all to that," they tell me proudly, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once did. Too often, not paying attention results, as it has in most of corporate America, in the almost total absence of women and minorities.

Most corporate boards, and especially their nominating committees and search committees, certainly don't pay attention to gender. How else can you explain the fact that the number of women on boards has been stuck at 13 percent for so long, or that almost half of Fortune 500 companies have one or no women on their boards? Could it be that no one notices?

There's the pipeline, of course. That's my favorite. For at least 20 years, people have been talking about this pipeline full of women, who somehow never make it from one end to the other. As it turns out, not only does motherhood prove destiny for many in the middle – ones who don't have husbands like Mr. Fiorina – but fewer women are entering it, and not many more coming out.

As the number of women entering college and law school and medical school have all increased, the number of women going to business school has not. Only 30 percent of all business school graduates are women, compared to 44 percent women in medical school and 51 percent in law school.

At the other end, among the top five earners in Fortune 500 companies, 95 percent are men and 5 percent are women, a dramatic increase of more than 2 percent in five years, according to statistics kept by the research group Catalyst.

Carly Fiorina got more attention than she deserved not because she is a woman but because there are so few in the highest levels of business today. The answer is not to pay less attention to the few, but to pay more attention to the rest.

COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE

Editor's note: