Woman in top job should not be big deal

Last week Hewlett-Packard did something that should not impress us. It should not draw our particular interest. It should not provoke commentary.

It certainly should not inspire - as, alas, it did - two-and-a-half full pages of coverage in Silicon Valley's principle newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News.

What Hewlett-Packard did last week was select a new chief executive, after a much-publicised search that took many months. In itself, of course, the appointment is moderately newsworthy, because venerable old H-P is at something of a crossroads. The company that in the 1940s single-handedly created the defining working culture of the California technology industry, at once paradoxically both laid-back and relaxed yet vigorous, is now a behemoth - the second largest computer company in the world after IBM.

The disadvantage of being a behemoth is you often move more and more slowly and find change bewildering. In what analysts see as a consequence of its size, its dominance and even its famed corporate culture, known as the H-P Way, H-P hasn't paid much attention to the Internet.

Nearly everyone agreed this must change, including H-P's outgoing CEO, the much-liked Lew Platt. There was speculation over who the new CEO might eventually be. Possible candidates in the ranks of tech industry senior management were picked over like so many possible matches for an arranged marriage.

Last week H-P made its announcement. The job had not gone to the only inside candidate, although after the appointment analysts agreed it must have been a close call. Instead the job went to a dynamic 44-year-old high-flyer from Lucent Technologies, the communications products spin-off of AT&T. The new CEO is widely considered an excellent choice because H-P will gain someone who understands one of the newest and most dynamic areas of technology, the convergence of business, the Internet and new telecommunications and networking possibilities.

The new CEO is a woman.

Carleton (Carly) Fiorina becomes the first woman to head a company in the leading Dow Jones industrial firms, a list of America's 30 strongest companies. Arguably, she is now the most powerful businesswoman in the world. H-P is ranked 13th in the Fortune 500 as a result of the appointment - Ms Fiorina easily tops the list of female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and also of the largest 150 technology companies in Silicon Valley.

As the CEO of the computers and printers division of H-P, she now manages a firm with $39.5 billion (€37.17 billion) in sales and 82,000 employees (the company has hived off its $7.6 billion-earning testing and medical equipment division as a separate entity). In comparison, Gateway had $7.5 billion in sales last year and Dell $18.2 billion.

After starting in a low-level sales position at AT&T she rapidly climbed the ranks, joining Lucent when it was born out of AT&T. As head of Lucent's global services division she had been seen as a leading candidate to become CEO in time. Energetic and adaptable she also led Lucent's preparations for its successful initial public offering, although she had no previous experience in finance.

Ms Fiorina, a medieval history and philosophy graduate and the daughter of a San Francisco judge father and an abstract painter mother, joins a small posse of female CEOs at other technology companies, all of which H-P dwarfs in income. Some of these tech women, like Apple's former chief technology officer Ellen Hancock, now CEO at Exodus Communications, and Kim Polese, CEO of Marimba, are well-known in the industry. Others, like Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz and eBay's Margaret Whitman keep lower profiles.

Unfortunately, to date and too often, the interest in these women and the publicity generated around them is based on their looks, not their capabilities - or more precisely, there is feverish male geek-press lust expressed through patronising articles that marvel at, for example, how Ms Polese not only is a computer scientist but a highly attractive, well-dressed woman who dances ballet in her spare time.

Despite the technology industry's claim that it is more open to women because it recognises and needs talent, not workers of a particular gender, New York research group Catalyst recently found that the tech industry employs fewer women in executive positions than industry as a whole. Women hold just 7 per cent of senior positions in Fortune 500 tech companies, compared to 11.2 per cent for the Fortune 500 overall.

The enormous interest and excitement generated by Ms Fiorina's appointment underlines how unusual it is for a woman to take the helm in this or any other industry. In offering her the position, H-P has demonstrated an admirable indifference that places it years ahead of its competitors. HP made gender a non-issue - so much so that the internal candidate who was considered to be the only serious challenger to Ms Fiorina on the shortlist was another woman - Ann Livermore, head of H-P's enterprise computing division and the company's Internet guru.

At some marvellous day in the future, perhaps we can all be so indifferent.

The appointment of a woman into a position such as this might only draw the usual (in the case of men) evaluation of ability and consideration of company strategy based upon that decision - not pages of articles analysing every aspect of the gender angle. Looking at the industry I fear that day is far, far distant. But bravo and bravo again H-P for starting us off on the long trek there.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie