What If Carly Were a Man?

"There will come a time when I won't be able to list on my fingers all of the CEOs of large companies who are women," says Cheryl Frank, a Stanford MBA student. "And there won't be much media attention each time a new one is appointed."

But the toll that the Fiorina story is taking makes Frank ambivalent about whether she wants to chase one of those jobs herself. Asked if she would be interested in living a year in the life of Carly Fiorina, she replies, "If only one could spend just a single year as CEO! They have the ability to create change, build great things, and enrich people's lives. But the bigger issue is, Do I want to spend 30 years before that, in the way that is required, to get to that point? There are certainly other ways to make money. There are jobs where the rewards come faster or where there are fewer obstacles on the way up."

In fact, anyone who focuses on big-company CEO jobs as the acme of success may be stuck in yesterday's game. Fields such as law, medicine, and national politics are becoming gender integrated as never before. Female investors are becoming the number-one growth market on Wall Street, as firms such as Goldman Sachs realize that career advancement has created a lot of wealthy women who don't want -- or need -- old-style, male-centric investment firms.

In recent years, women have been forming businesses at twice the rate of men. Many of those are small ventures, but entrepreneurial women such as Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart have succeeded on a much larger scale, one that has brought extraordinary fame and wealth. What's more, people like Winfrey and Stewart have largely been able to write the rules as they go along. It's their company, and they need not struggle to win over the board, the institutional investors, or the Wall Street analysts anytime they want to do something.

Whatever happens to Fiorina, there will be other women who will make it all the way to CEO at very large companies. Strikingly, right in the midst of Fiorina's agonizing battle to line up shareholder support for the Compaq deal, her previous employer, Lucent Technologies, hired Patricia Russo, a top female executive from Kodak, to be its next CEO.

Yet during the past 12 months, we have also seen once-renowned female CEOs such as Jill Barad of Mattel and Ellen Hancock of Exodus Communications lose their jobs as their businesses headed south. And the circle of high-profile female CEOs is still small enough that it's hard to shrug off those setbacks as mere random noise that needn't distract anyone.

So what if Fiorina fails at HP? As Stanford MBA student Jamie Earle puts it, "If you can survive and grow from a failure like this, you'll be all the stronger for the next battle. Men get into situations like this all the time. Either they say, 'I messed up,' or they just move on. They're masters at moving on! I've seen men rise like the phoenix from utter disaster -- business blunders, financial ruin, personal scandal -- and they move on like it was nothing. 'Next!' they say, and they don't look back.

"I hope Fiorina will do the same," Earle continues. "The more we see our female role models learning to move on and not agonizing over failures or public humiliation, the better."

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) runs Fast Company's West Coast bureau from San Francisco. Find a catalog of his columns here.