We knew we had to retune. Our future was in jeopardy. There were 15 or 20,000 people who were very upset.

Maybe it was the water. Jack, we've got 400 million dollars missing.

We've never had a company go bankrupt. From day one, you are the CEO.

If you look at a certain batch of statistics from a certain angle, you think that women in the US are an equal or better footing than men.

Women have a lower unemployment rate than men, more women get bachelor's degrees than men, nearly 40% of MBA graduates are female.

I won't just say if I told you that the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 recently hit an all-time high.

It's a cause for celebration, right? But let's look at the actual numbers.

Out of those 500 companies, there were, as of early 2018, 27 female CEOs, 5.4%. Why?

We're several decades into a revolution that brought hundreds of millions of women into the global workforce, and 40% of managers are women.

So what's keeping more of them from reaching the top?

To be sure, it's a complex question with the number of factors, some of which you've surely thought about.

But there's one you probably haven't thought about. Probably haven't even heard of it. Let's start here.

I'm Carol Bartz. I'm a retired tech exec.

We've been hearing from Bartz throughout this secret life of a CEO series. For 14 years, she ran the software firm Autodesk.

In 2009, Bartz became CEO of Yahoo, which at one point was the world's most popular web destination with a market cap worth of $110 billion.

But by 2009, it was faltering. It was losing search business, it was losing display ad business, it had controversially rejected a huge buyout offer from Microsoft.

But Bartz thought she could turn things around.

The company was just beaten to the ground, and I really felt that I could help with that and give us some air time to get back together.

But that is not what happened. Revenue continued to fall. The Yahoo board with the Microsoft non-deal, still a recent memory, started having second thoughts about Bartz.

And they got scared and they didn't want to be considered the worst board in the world again.

And they thought, well, we know how to do this. We'll just fire Carol.

In retrospect, do you feel that it was to any degree for you a kind of suicide mission?

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