*Cough!* SUCCESSFUL tenure? The stock price of that company went into the drink while she was at the helm. Virtually everyone agrees that regardless of her sex, she had to go.

In fact, one of the board members who was most heavily-critical of her performance was Patricia Dunn (a female).

Before you start to complain about how horribly the world treats women, at least get your freakin' story straight.

i wouldn't be as strongly critical of CF's performance at H-P over the years as some, but even i have to say she was at least as controversial as she was successful.

it was under her tenure H-P decided (briefly) to abandon the pocket calculator business, which had started the company running and helped define its public image for decades. (image matters, even among the techies and geeks that used those calculators. H-P meant *quality* in the minds of those geeks, largely because of the damn things. dropping them was a marketing and PR mistake.)

it was also she who pushed through the multi-billion-dollar merger with Compaq, which nearly started a shareholder revolt to try and stop it. today it's four years later, and the financial benefits of that merger are still in dispute. those aren't the hallmarks of great success; granted that she can't be described as any failure, either, but a tycoon she's not.

...then again, now that feministing's server seems to have woken up and had a cup of coffee ;-) i have to give Ms. Fiorina some credit also. H-P is busily reinventing itself as a consumer imaging and digital photography company at present, a drive that had to have started under her. it seems to be a successful move, so far, and it can't have been an obviously successful strategy - the counterarguments might well have gone down the lines of, "go up against Xerox and Kodak, both? why on earth would we want to do that?". yet they're doing it, and doing well - somebody has to get the credit for that, and lacking better information, Carly's the obvious candidate for it.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with "Not Voxper". The only way in which Carly Fiorina was "successful" was in managing to land a position obviously well over her head. She bungled the Compaq merger, and then ended up partly dismantling the "management by walking around" corporate culture that led to the high morale and high quality output from its employees from previous years. In just a few years, HP went from a place where employees loved to come in to work with each other to a place where departments mistrusted each other, and workers mistrusted management.

I may be a bit biased in this, as my mother was employed by HP, and I got a lot of the horror stories, but I think it's well worth noting that the day she resigned, HP stock prices jumped sharply. It's very telling when the thing that increased shareholder value the most over the course of your career was your resignation.

Glad to see that I've gotten some agreement. (Usually people just call me an asshole regardless of what I say.) Sadly, I think many self-described feminists have difficulty accepting that if a woman fails, it might be because she honestly didn't do a good job and it's not necessarily because the patriarchy is out to screw her. In fact, there are four rules that make Vanessa's reaction so predictable as to be banal...

1. If a woman succeeds in her position, she did so because of her actions. We should all proudly hold her as an example of how women can succeed if things are 'equal' enough. And it's not necessarily sexist to suggest that being a woman provided her with the unique skills and insights that she needed in order to attain the position.

2. If a woman ever fails in her position, we should attribute her failure to anything BUT her own actions. We should blame it on vast, impersonal forces that are constantly preventing women from attaining the high position from which the woman in question fell. In fact, it's sexist to even suggest that her sex had anything to do with her failure, except to assert that her sex is the reason why various forces conspired to MAKE her fail.

3. If a man gets a high-ranking position, it's almost certainly because he had an unfair advantage owing to his sex and certainly not because he won it fair and square. But if a woman gets a high-ranking position, it's always because she won it fair and square. (To suggest that she unfairly got the position because of her sex is wholly out of the question, it supposedly never happens so much as once.)

4. If a man fails in a high-ranking position, it's because he screwed-up and demonstrates that more women are needed in his position. If a woman fails in a high-ranking position, it demonstrates how unfair everything is for females.

Using the above guidelines, you can pretty much predict the feministing reaction with great precision. The overriding mentality here is literally down at THAT level of childishness.

Vox, it'd be a lot easier to notice the things you get right if you stopped descending to hyperbole at every opportunity.

A few corrections, since I seem to have accidentally encouraged you by agreeing with you on the general topic of Carly Fiorina's skill:

1) HP stock didn't "go into the drink". It declined slightly overall, but the company isn't near collapse. This is admittedly somewhat worse than it sounds, because it should have gone significantly upwards during that time, and didn't.

2) Your straw man characterization of the feminist viewpoint is utterly uncalled for, and completely unsupported. If you want to demonstrate that Vanessa is an unreasonable extremist, you're going to actually have to quote her behaving that way. I haven't read anything yet to support your accusation.

The issue at stake here doesn't even have anything to do with whether or not Carly Fiorina failed because of sexism, but whether or not she's receiving undue attention and criticism now, after her failure, because of the novelty of her being a female CEO. There may even be some merit to this in the general sense, but I think it's overshadowed by the fact that people have been loathing her as a CEO for quite some length of time -- and not, as far as I can tell, because she's a woman.

There's a second potential argument in that she was brought in specifically to bring in a fresh perspective, which she certainly did, and then got attacked for it because she's a woman. It's hard to say whether the changes she was attempting would have met less resistance if they had come from a man; I'm inclined to think that the answer might be yes, but it can't be demonstrated, and in any case, I don't see it as greatly important. If she scored a minor victory by overcoming sexism to win the merger in the first place, she suffered a much worse defeat by failing to properly plan out the merger transition and take into account a corporate culture that *worked* until she broke it.

Like I said, though, I may be showing personal bias in that.

1. Maybe my phrasing was a bit harsh, but it's hard to not notice that since she came-in as CEO 6 years ago, HP shares lost 63% of their value under her watch. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=HPQ&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=&c=%5EGSPC&c=%5EIXIC&c=%5EDJI here's a chart for the last 5 years, compared to the performance of the rest of the major market indexes. By any standard, it's not a performance to write home about. Feel free to mention as many silver linings as you like, though.

2. If the managers of the site were capable of responding to any critical comment with something other than the inevitable, self-pitying chorus of "you're sexist" or "we're oppressed", then I probably wouldn't resort to sarcasm. But they're so accustomed to winning arguments with some variation of those two hackneyed and shopworn accusations that I can partially understand if they feel threatened and angered by someone who can't be browbeaten or shamed into silence. (Lately, they've found it easier to ban whatever IP I happen to be surfing from. Anything but the most obsequiousness praise is simply unacceptable here.)

"Not" Voxper--did it every oocur to you that a lot of folks simply find YOUR comments too hackneyed to respond to? Believe it or not, but we have jobs and shit to do besides responding to every comment. Esp. from people who write the same thing over and over and over.

Your comments all come back to the same tired accusation that feminists are hypocritical. You also fail to have any real analysis in your comments, unless you count personal attacks or self-aggrandizing claims of being censored. If you haven't noticed, feministing has A LOT of folks here who don't agree with us. But as I've said before, when you start commenting just to be a dick and not to say anything that has to do with the discussion going on, then yeah--I'll erase your comments and ban your IP address. Because as much as I like having you here sometimes (you really make the case for feminism by being so predictably misogynist), I'm not going to put up with personal attacks.

The ranting of feminists in the past were as follows........

"By the year 2000, women will not only match Men in speed and strength, but women will surpase all males by running the 100 meters 3 seconds faster."

"Women are perfect" ! perfect what ?

Here we have a site that builds itself on lies and exaggerations.
How is it possible to continually deny that fact ?

So when women fail as they do often, there is always the excuse, the copout, "it must have been someone else's fault" mentality.

Feminism is living the lies. Well done girls.

If it's wrong to fire a woman because of her gender, why is it okay to hire her for the same reason?

It's all about capitalism. The only thing that matters is the green.

"...did it every oocur to you that a lot of folks simply find YOUR comments too hackneyed to respond to?"

I’ve noticed that any criticism that you do not wish to think about gets knee-jerkingly dismissed as 'tired' and 'old' by you. And you say this as if claming 'sexism' as the source of every female complaint for the past 30-odd years is a totally fresh and paradigm-breaking perspective which is worthy of being repeated several times per day. Yeah, right. If you want to see a fount of 'hackneyed' and 'tired' statements, you ought to look the mirror.

As for the reckless charge of me being a misogynist, (while claiming that *I* am the one making personal attacks) I don't think any person who knows me in real life would describe me as such.

My point is not that feminists are hypocrities. My point is that *some* feminists are hypocrites, and most of this site's managers seem to fall into that category owing to their cult-like devotion to a set of emotionally-potent dogmas. (And it's not just my idea- a poster in the thread "Even Cowgirls Get Their Dues" made a valid point about the hypocrisy of claiming not to like wage gaps while being enthusiastic about pay gaps that benefit women. Her point was ignored and she was dismissed.) And if you would ever admit hypocrisy, I would probably go away. But you won’t do that because you prefer to believe that you're unfalsifiable.

Fortunately, not all the site managers act so blatantly adolescent; Samhita seems to be quite level-headed. It's a shame she doesn't post more often.

Bandersnatch: Really good point. Filling quotas, such as the half men, half women thing is hot, steamy shit.

Jessica: I also like having Volxper, except not for the same reasons as you. I don't think he's being misogynist at all. The fact that you even accuse him of being misogonist is like having a black person yelling 'Ha! You disagreed with what I said, hence you must be a racist!'

"Countries that aren't with us are against us." Do you remember who said this? It's funny how many membors on the forum take on the same attitude that their favourite president Bush takes.

When you call him misogynist, you only make yourself look like a foolish child who doesn't respond well to satire or criticism.

People like him are needed to keep hypocrisy (namely you guys) in check.

As a woman, I'm quite appalled by the close mindedness of this website. Feminism has become a modern day KKK disgused as a liberator of the 'oppressed.' I have never, not ONCE in my life felt oppressed or stifled in any way. You know why? Because when you rely on WORKING for what you want, EARNING your respect and using logic as well as ACTION as proof of achievement, nobody is going to care what sex you are.

Much in the same way that CF deserved to be fired and probably should've never been hired in the first place. I don't give a flying duck if she's male, female or a dog.

SHE'S BEING TREATED AS AN EQUAL BY BEING FIRED FOR DOING A BAD JOB.

I think it's good that people will be examing her case more. And here's my reason:

MAYBE IT'LL HELP THEM REALIZE HOW UNFAIR AND DAMAGING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS.

For all of those reading this that aren't hypocrites, I apologise. This doesn't apply to you :)

Vox:

"If the managers of the site were capable of responding to any critical comment with something other than the inevitable, self-pitying chorus of "you're sexist" or "we're oppressed", then I probably wouldn't resort to sarcasm."

The problem is that they are, and they do, of course. Despite having disagreed with them on several occasions, they've never been less than polite to me, probably because I've never been less than polite to them. They've responded similarly to others who disagreed civilly as well.

You, on the other hand, seem to never have learned polite discourse. I'd have banned you too, and taken the extra step of immediately removing your comments. Be civil, or begone. Your continued, undefended (or poorly defended, at best) assertions of hypocrisy seem to indicate that your perspective is that if a woman says it, and it criticises a man or a sexist or potentially sexist situation, it must be hypocrisy, no matter how well supported it is — and that is, in fact, misogyny.

To touch upon your lone example of the Cowgirls article (found at http://feministing.com/archives/000918.html for reference), at no point in the article did anyone make the claim that a wage gap that favored women was something to be widely desired, and it was pointed out in fact (by Sally) that only in 15 out of 3000 counties did the wage gap run in that direction. In a world with gender equality, that should be *1500*, a hundred times as many, and the wage gaps should be by roughly the same amount in each direction on each side. In any statistical sample, there will be deviations from the straight normal plot, and bias is shown by whether more of them are on one side than another. What made that article so entertaining is that in that town, the wage gap in favor of women was in fact the direct result of sexism -- but aimed against women! It's a direct case of being hoist by your own petard, so to speak, and had me chuckling for quite a while.

There's no hypocrisy involved in showing amusement at the situation, nor even in expressing a temptation to live where you might get paid more. If someone had claimed that a 30% nationwide wage gap in favor of women was a laudable goal, you might have a point... but nobody did. Deb's point wasn't ignored (it was addressed by both C-bird and Sally), nor was she "dismissed" (she received a direct reply by C-bird before you derailed the conversation).

Bandersnatch, SupaSpy: What the heck are you guys talking about? When did affirmative action enter into the topic? When did "for us or against us" enter into it? Are you seriously saying that you think affirmative action is being applied to CEOs, and she was only hired because she was a woman? This sort of wild, undefended, counter-to-known-reality assertion (along with your personal attacks) is the reason why other remarks that might possibly have merit get ignored. Don't expect someone to strain raw sewage with their teeth just to catch the occasional nugget of potentially valid information.

Judging by what Jessica *doesn't* delete, not only does she not deserve the scorn that is being heaped upon her, she's showing a lot more tolerance and patience than I would expect.

Good grief. I got better behaviour out of the visitors to my site when I did research on Eason Jordan's claim, and that's more controversial than anything that shows up here. She's right — the quality of the comments here are doing as much to demonstrate the problems with sexism and misogyny as the articles.

"Your continued, undefended (or poorly defended, at best) assertions of hypocrisy seem to indicate that your perspective is that if a woman says it, and it criticises a man or a sexist or potentially sexist situation, it must be hypocrisy, no matter how well supported it is — and that is, in fact, misogyny."

Spare me the ad hominems. You'll notice that I've never accused Samhita of hypocrisy. And if she continues as she usually does, there will be no need to. If your reckless accusation of misogyny were true, I'd have flamed her by now as well.

My core contention since Day 1 has been that quite a number of the regulars here simply call themselves 'feminist' in order to camouflage the fact that they project their own sexism onto everyone else. If you honestly think that qualifies as 'misogyny', then you don't know what 'misogyny' is.

The fact of the matter is, taking an ideological perspective ALWAYS results in some form of hypocrisy and projection and the ideology of this web-site is no different. The more of your emotions that you have invested in the ideology, then the more you are blind to the contradictions and the more you make rationalizations for it. And in the case of the present crowd, they've found that making claims of 'sexism' is a great way of guilting people into allegiance with them. And whenever someone puts it to them straight, they bellow at them to go to hell for saying so.

And what's really kind of funny is that for a very long while, I used to consider myself to be a feminist. But over time, it got harder and harder to not notice all the inward contradictions and all the sexist ways in which many self-described feminists often choose to behave. How they act hurt & offended whenever it's convenient, how they often try to make excuses for women who are violent while insisting there is no excuse for violence against women and so on down a long list. If you ever wonder why most women don't call themselves 'feminist' (although they may agree with its stated goals), one BIG reason is because the rationalized hypocrisy turns people off. And you can blame the media for that if you like. You can blame right-wingers, blame male sexists, blame the Easter Bunny, blame whoever you want. But the hypocrisy to which I refer is pretty clear to almost everyone but those who refuse to look in the mirror.

Zed,

Thanks for posting that link to the cowgirls discussion.

Voxper's quotes were golden.

I'm sure Carly would laugh to no end to see feminists come to her defense, considering she's a conservative Republican.

The truth about Carly and her being removed wasn't so much because she didn't perform. She did exactly what the board hired her to do. Shake things up at HP and search for a new direction. They knew what they were getting when they hired her. Carly's biggest shortcoming was to not be flexible. After the board's grand idea of a departure from "The HP Way" proved unsuccessful, the board realized it had to again change directions. When they asked Carly to make changes, she refused. Hence, the board was left with no option but to replace her.

This has nothing to do with sex or mysogony. This was simply a case of a square peg and a round hole. At age 50, and $45 million in walking money, she has the choice to retire or pop up just about anywhere else she would like.