What Glass Ceiling?

Carly Fiorina takes over Hewlett-Packard, becoming the first woman CEO of a Dow 30 firm

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A medieval-history major at Stanford, Fiorina holds an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.S. from M.I.T. She once worked as a secretary at HP before joining AT&T in its Washington office, where she sold phone systems to the government. Her career trajectory has been steepening ever since, to the point where her husband, Frank Fiorina, 49, took early retirement from his job as a director of government sales at AT&T to become a full-time househusband. He knew early on, he says, that she was destined to become a CEO.

Still, the technology sector has been notoriously slow to promote women executives--only 7% of top officers at FORTUNE 500 tech firms are female. But in this business where brand and the CEO become interchangeable--think of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Dell's Michael Dell--Fiorina's gender may actually become an advantage. In PCs, where HP faces increasing competition, products are becoming more commodity-like and prices are falling. Now, HP's gray boxes, in part because of Fiorina's gender, will have just a little bit more cachet than the other guys' gray boxes. That in turn could, in the hypercompetitive world of technology, prompt more firms to tap women for top jobs. And even Fiorina might find that noteworthy.

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