On Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz announced that, while he has yet to secure his party’s nomination and in fact is lagging pretty far behind his rival Donald Trump, he’s selected a running mate. That running mate is the only woman to enter the Republican field this year: Carly Fiorina.
Cruz’s announcement came a day after he lost all five states that held primaries to Trump. His polling also lags far behind the frontrunner. The Fiorina announcement appears to be an attempt to juice those numbers and grab some media attention, diverting it from Trump. But his campaign still remains a long shot — Trump has a 425-delegate lead in the pursuit of the 1,237 threshold.
Cruz is deploying a tried-and-true strategy of using a woman to shake things up in the face of bad odds. And it’s one that Fiorina should be quite familiar with.
Reams of research have uncovered a phenomenon that’s come to be known as the “glass cliff”: in the business world, women are far more likely to be put in charge of a company when that company’s prospects are on the decline and whose success is uncertain, rather than during boom times. That often sets them up for failure, or at least a more rocky tenure, than if they were given opportunities at healthy firms. Men, on the other hand, are much more likely to get those easier positions.
Some women still manage to engineer turnarounds and end up lauded for their efforts. But given the enormity of the task they face coming in the door, they often struggle. Female CEOs are more likely to get forced out of their jobs than male counterparts.
Fiorina’s claim to fame before her presidential run was her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and it’s undoubtedly a controversial tenure. She infamously laid off 30,000 people — although the man who took over after her also implemented big layoffs — and she faced stark opposition from her board over her decision to acquire Compaq.
But that’s not where the story starts. When Fiorina was named to the position, making her the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company, the tech bubble was just beginning to burst, taking many companies down with it. The HP appointment was blatantly in reaction to its struggles and Fiorina was brought in to clean things up.
Her success in doing so depends on who you ask. The company’s stock price fell by 50 percent under her watch, and net earnings also declined. While the HP board doubted the Compaq acquisition and publicly attacked her for it, it led to the company being the largest computer manufacturer in the country for a time and the company’s stock has far outpaced its rivals’ since then. In the end, Fiorina was forced out of the job after a high-profile battle with the board, to be replaced by Mark Hurd, who laid off 15,200 people and struggled to produce financial results.
Now Fiorina is being picked to a historic position — only two other women have been nominated to major-party presidential tickets — to again help a desperate and struggling team turn things around. And this, too, has some historical precedent. While there is obviously a short track record of female vice presidential picks, the two other women named to these slots were brought in under similar circumstances: Geraldine Ferraro, selected as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, and Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice presidential pick in 2008.
According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Mondale was polling under 45 percent for months before the convention where he announced Ferraro’s selection and had a just 38 percent polling average in the two weeks immediately before it. McCain similarly had a 47 percent polling average before the convention where he picked Palin. For his part, Cruz is polling at 43 percent against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and is averaging 28 percent in the Republican race against Trump’s 43 percent.
As with any glass cliff, Fiorina’s chances of actually becoming vice president aren’t completely doomed. Cruz and Kasich have teamed up to stop Trump and a contested convention could still end up in Cruz’s favor. But the odds are long. And if history is any guide, victory is unlikely. There are just 20 women in charge of the country’s 500 largest companies. Neither Ferraro nor Palin ended up in the high office they aspired for. Many women end up falling off of the glass cliff.