Interview With Carly Fiorina

L.G.: You're a high-tech person, and I just went on Facebook to see if I could find you and somebody named Carly Fiorina seems to have joined, like, four days ago. Was that you?

C.F.: Nope, not me. It was not someone on my behalf that I'm aware of.

L.G.: Okay, so you're not a member of Facebook.

C.F.: No.

L.G.: You're on the Fox Business Network still?

C.F.: No. I suspended that agreement. It was a conflict to do this.

L.G.: Do you have any thoughts of why Fox Business hasn't gotten a bit more traction than it has?

C.F.: I think when you're doing something like that, you have to take the long view. I think that Rupert Murdoch clearly is taking the long view. He is building a business franchise with that channel, with the Wall Street Journal. I have no doubt that it will be very successful, but I think you can't expect a brand-new channel to get it all done in less than 12 months, which is about what we're talking about.

L.G.: It's so high-profile, there's no shortage of people that would want to throw brickbats at them.

C.F.: There are a lot of people who want it to fail.

L.G.: [Laughs] By the way, do you feel any kinship at all with any of these high-profile women on Wall Street who have been very publicly defenestrated, like Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley and Erin Callan at Lehman Brothers and Sallie Krawcheck at Citigroup?

C.F.: Well, look, men and women get fired. I think everyone in business or in politics, man or woman, understands that at the top, it's a rough game. But I think it's also undeniably true that women in positions of authority are characterized differently, scrutinized differently, talked about differently, than are men. So I have no information to make a judgment about how or why they were fired. I would only observe that women are always talked about differently. I have great empathy for Hillary Clinton.

L.G.: Indeed, I noticed that some of the ways your situation at H.P. was characterized treated your conflict with [then Hewlett-Packard director and later chairwoman] Patricia Dunn as something out of that Clint Eastwood women's boxing movie. Is that a fact of life now in corporate America and in the media? Do you think we'll ever get beyond that?

C.F.: Well, I don't think that's a fact of life in corporate America. I think women at the top of any field are still relatively rare. I mean, if you just look at the data in corporate America today, 16 percent of the senior officers and board members are women. That number hasn't budged in five years. So it's still quite rare, and it's clearly quite rare in politics as well. So when something is unusual, as women are in positions of authority, it gets scrutinized more, differently, the standards are different. That's just true, and I think we haven't moved beyond that completely yet. The media is a big part of it, no question.

L.G.: Hillary pointed out that toward the end of her race, she felt there was a lot of gender bias, particularly on some of the cable networks—and you agree with that analysis?

C.F.: I don't know how you can disagree. I think we have come to the point where we know, thankfully, that racism is unacceptable. I don't think we have come to the point where we understand that sexism is unacceptable. You know? When male anchors can jokingly say, and everybody gets the joke, "Well, Hillary is going to lose because she reminds people of their first wife," or when detractors hold up signs that say, "Iron my shirt," I mean, that's just not acceptable.

L.G.: So do you think if you talk like that enough and get enough attention for it, maybe you will peel off some Hillary votes for McCain?

C.F.: Well, you know, this is not a political comment. I think women recognize and understand what goes on with other women, and we empathize.

L.G.: Let me ask one last question. I'm just fascinated that your Stanford thesis was on the medieval practice of trial by ordeal.

C.F.: I know, isn't that wild?

L.G.: Have you gone back to look at it?

C.F.: Oh yeah, occasionally. I haven't done it in quite a number of years. But I'll tell you something even crazier. I went back and read text in the original Greek and the original Latin, I really got into it. It was interesting, I found it intellectually challenging.

L.G.: And it's had some kind of application to modern times, obviously.

C.F.: Well, I wouldn't go that far.

L.G.: Did you ever read Sex and the Single Zillionaire? [A cheesy novel, featuring scenes of sadomasochism, by Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Perkins, Fiorina's nemesis on the Hewlett-Packard board of directors.]

C.F.: I did not. My husband read a few chapters.

L.G.: Did he give it a review?

C.F.: Um...I guess his overall thinking was, "too much information."

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