Fiorina’s rise
by digby
Just a little note about her claims to have risen from the bowels of the pink collar ghetto as a secretary: it’s not exactly true. She did work as a part time secretary during her summers while in college and briefly as a receptionist for a real estate firm between dropping out of law school and getting her MBA. When she graduated from business school she entered AT&T’s management training program and was promoted through that. She didn’t start out in the typing pool. Very few women did. No matter how well you did your job in those days — and many women were the ones who actually did the work of the executives they served — there was virtually no way to break out except in rare cases you might get a middle management gig in human resources or administration.
That is not to say that very many women rose through management training programs either and I don’t want to cast too many aspersions on her achievement in rising to the top of a corporation. It is still rare, no matter the route to get there. But Fiorina’s myth is designed to make it sound as though she rose up from the very bottom and that’s just not true. She had an MBA and was anointed from the beginning of her career as a woman headed for the executive suite. Good for her. But she’s not a working class hero.
.