The truth about Carly

In defending her stormy reign at Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina talks about stuffing her pants and rediscovering the glass ceiling.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Rebecca Traister, Life

Oct. 19, 2006 | When Carleton "Carly" Fiorina busted gender barriers by being appointed president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she famously, swaggeringly, proclaimed there was no such thing as a glass ceiling for women. Pretty much ever since then, she has been eating karmic crow, culminating with her spectacular firing at the hands of an unruly board in February 2005.

Last week Fiorina published her memoir, "Tough Choices," in which she focuses especially on the opportunities and offenses she experienced as a woman in the corporate world. Apparently, the newly humbled Fiorina now sees the brittle transparencies above her where once she saw none.

Fiorina graduated from Stanford with a degree in medieval history and philosophy and dropped out of law school before taking a job as a secretary at a commercial property brokerage firm. She eventually rose as an executive within AT&T, becoming president of Lucent's Global Service Provider business, and was hired as HP's top dog in 1999 at 44. Her tenure at the Silicon Valley dinosaur was as rocky as they come: She presided during the inflation and explosion of the technology bubble, laying off thousands of employees and engineering a merger with Compaq that provoked a heinous legal battle with a company co-founder's son, Walter Hewlett.

Fiorina was fired by the HP board not long after she missed her estimated earnings for the third quarter of 2004 by a whopping 23 percent. Fiorina says that the "dysfunctional board" never explained to her the reasons for her dismissal, but maintains in "Tough Choices" that it was not about her performance. Instead, she chronicles her tussles with two influential board members, Jay Keyworth and Tom Perkins, whom she believes orchestrated her ouster, in part, she speculates, because she would not implement all their suggestions for running the company, and in part, perhaps, because they did not like her crackdown on leaks from the board to the press. Further investigation into the leaks, conducted by Patricia Dunn, Fiorina's successor as board chair, has led to felony charges against Dunn for unauthorized spying on board members and journalists, a fortuitous bit of publishing kismet that has put Fiorina's memoir on the front page.

Aside from the company turbulence, Fiorina's stay at HP was pocked by attention to her every personal detail: from her dogs to her clothes to the marble in her bathrooms to her marriage to a man who put his career second to hers and with whom she raised children from his first marriage. Named the most powerful woman in business year after year, Fiorina graced magazine covers in expensive clothes, gave good sound-bite, and pushed lumbering old HP to move like a sailfish through the currents of the new economy. But her marketing-heavy, engineering-light pizazz did not go down easy with the boys of Silicon Valley. Whether she was a slick, irresponsible showgirl who didn't understand the business she was shepherding, or was scapegoated for making the wrenching changes necessary for an ancien-regime company to keep up in the nouveau economy is still up for debate.

But much as Fiorina's story is about being a girl in a boy's world, it is also riddled with moments in which she chose to ape the signifiers of masculine power. She once donned cowboy boots, stuffed her pants with her husband's socks, and announced to a testosterone-y sales team from Ascend Communications, "Our balls are as big as anyone's in this room." She attended business meetings at strip clubs, took a female dinner partner for a Korean kisaeng party, and brags about an HP board member who once called her "the son Dave [Packard] never had." If "Tough Choices" is a compelling document of the ways in which the business and tech worlds code femininity as suspect, it's also a useful guide to power cross-dressing.

But when we met for lunch last week, it was immediately obvious that Fiorina could never really have passed. Perfectly ordinary-looking in photographs, in person everything about her seems to reflect light as if it's been buffed: her smile, her blond hair, her eyes and a creamy crocheted bell-sleeved jacket that was so strikingly beautiful that it was easy for a reporter to suddenly understand why others had taken time to describe Fiorina's sartorial choices.

When you took the HP job, you famously said that there was no glass ceiling.

Dumb thing to say.

How soon did you know it was a dumb thing to say?

The next day I realized that I hadn't said what I intended to say. When I became the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, I had only done maybe two television interviews in my life; I didn't get that you don't get to explain. What I meant was that women shouldn't fixate on an invisible barrier that's going to get in their way, they should focus on the possibilities. My gender isn't the thing we should be talking about; we should be talking about what you would talk about if I were a man. But none of that came across. I offended people and that wasn't my intention.

But you've written this book about the way you were treated differently as a woman. So isn't it in fact important to talk about gender differences?

Clearly I think it's important. I explained that [glass ceiling] comment in the book because I knew I had been foolish in my choice of words. When I went into business, my desire was to be able to play by the same rules as everyone else. I thought when I went to HP that we had come further than we had. I hoped I was advancing women in business by putting women in positions of responsibility. But it's clear that we don't yet play by the same rules and it's clear that there aren't enough women in business, and the stereotypes will exist as long as there aren't enough of us.

Next page: "Did I get caught up in board dysfunction? Yes, I got fired"