THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Carly Fiorina’s Case for Merit

When in 1979 Britain’s voters made Margaret Thatcher prime minister, one conclusion that did not trip instantly to everyone’s lips was that she won because she was a woman. Only in America do we have checklists of political and moral self-satisfaction.

Today, two women bid to become “America’s first woman president”—Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Carly Fiorina.Only one is running on this as reason alone to vote for her. Announcing her candidacy Saturday at New York’s Roosevelt Island, Hillary Clinton said, “I may not be the youngest candidate in this race. But I will be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States!”

Days earlier, Carly Fiorina delivered a speech to the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the subject of feminism. For which various feminists attacked her. A blogger at Cosmopolitan.com said feminism “cannot coexist with a political philosophy that venerates traditionalism, hierarchy, deference to authority, and distinct gender roles.”

None of the 13 or so men running for the GOP’s nomination will ever be found within a mile of this radioactive subject, for fear it might agitate the “single women” who are supposed to slide into Hillary Clinton’s column.

Though Ms. Fiorina never mentioned Hillary Clinton in her speech, she ran right at what are considered settled issues in the political category called gender. “Feminism,” she said, “began as a rallying cry to empower women—to vote, to get an education, to enter the workplace. But over the years, feminism has devolved into a left-leaning political ideology where women are pitted against men and used as a political weapon to win elections.”

Ideological feminism, she said, “shuts down conversation” on campuses or in the media with any person who is said to be “waging a war on women” or a “threat to women’s health.” This is true. Last year students at Smith College said they were disinviting International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagardeas commencement speaker because the IMF strengthens “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Could Hillary speak at Smith?

Let no one doubt that when Carly Fiorina, a long shot for the GOP nomination, arrives in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, she hopes some Republican women will vote for her. Ms. Fiorina’s political calculation has to be that there are more women than is generally imagined who don’t associate with the left’s doctrinal feminism and Hillary Clinton’s allegiance to it. Polling on the subject says only 17% to 25% of women self-identify as “feminists,” which suggests that outside the fight clubs of politics, alternative ideas on this subject are possible.

On the history of male attitudes toward women in business, Ms. Fiorina is aligned with the views of many women. She describes entering a world of client meetings held in strip clubs and a boss who joked she was the “token bimbo.”

What seems to gall Ms. Fiorina’s critics is her determination to build an argument for women around the word “merit.” At Hewlett-Packard,when she was CEO, she describes a promotion system designed to both drive diversity and “ruthlessly cultivate meritocracies.”

When job openings occurred, she insisted on a candidate slate that was both diverse and qualified, with the best person selected. “By the end of my tenure,” she says, “half of my direct reports were women. They rose on merit.”

One critic of the speech, a New Republic writer, said Ms. Fiorina’s “run-of-the-mill” self-help system is oblivious to what poor women need: “The way to help impoverished people is to deliver resources to them, through either the labor market or state transfers.” One may ask: Has the idea of “merit” become a political red flag for progressives?

In her speech, Ms. Fiorina argued that the resource system for poor women is broken. A woman certainly cannot rise on merit, she says, much less get that first foot in the door, unless the education system qualifies her to compete on merit. For many, especially low-income women, the public schools they attend don’t do that. And some of them know it. She cites the thousands of black and Hispanic parents who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in 2013 to protest mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s intention to suppress parental choice and New York’s charter-school movement.

As to the “war on women” and reproductive rights, Ms. Fiorina posits the destructive connection between out-of-wedlock births, now estimated to be 40% of all births in the U.S., and the relatively lower economic outcomes for single mothers.

The meritocratic Carly Fiorina will have to live with a GOP primary-debate qualification system whose polling math may leave her out and put the bar-stool bloviator from central casting, Donald Trump,onstage with nine other guys.

But I’d pay money to see Carly Fiorina debate the status of women in America with the woman who is running for the presidency as an entitlement. In her Roosevelt Island speech, Hillary said her opponents “shame and blame women.” Only one Republican will take that on.

Write to henninger@wsj.com.