Under the vaulted stone ceiling of the National Cathedral Tuesday night, Kamala Harris talked about another type of ceiling: the glass one she failed to break.
The former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate sat down with Fortune editor in chief Alyson Shontell on Day 2 of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit to discuss her new book, the future of the Democratic party, and her 107-day race for president that ended in defeat.
She said she wrote her new book, 107 Days, so her voice was present in accounts of the historic 2024 election, and she cited dis- and misinformation as a factor in her loss and the on-going distrust among Americans. In talking about her defeat, she also laid out, in stark terms, the tricky situation she stepped into as the Democratic nominee: “A president is running for re-election… Three and a half months before the election, he decides not to run. The sitting vice president decides to take up the mantle against the former president of the United States, who had been running for 10 years, with 107 days to go.”
That circumstance seems like a quintessential ‘glass cliff,’ the phenomenon in which women are tapped for near-impossible jobs, but Harris dismissed that idea on-stage based on what it might imply about her future: A glass cliff “suggests finality, and I’m not into that.”
The former California attorney general and U.S. senator, who recently opted to not enter the California gubernatorial race, didn’t specify what she’ll do next.
Harris also shared the advice she gives to the young women she mentors who are taking aim at the ceiling above them—stone, glass or otherwise: “Sometimes with a bit of frustration, I’ve said to them, ‘Do you think that breaking barriers means you start out on one side of the barrier and just end up on the other side of the barrier?’ No, there’s breaking involved. And when you break things, you might get cut and you might bleed, and it is worth it every single time.”
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
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The former solicitor general on how the courts can respond to Trump's tariffs: Even with the authority to halt tariffs, courts may believe "it would be incredibly disruptive to try to scramble those eggs," or undo the president's signature economic policy.
What keeps Best Buy's CEO up at night? For Corie Barry, it's the growing gap in affluence between high earners and the rest of the country. "Anytime the entire economy is heavily reliant on a small, narrow population of people, that is not good for the long-term health of the economy," she told me onstage.
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More legal immigration is necessary for American farmers, Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford told Fortune's Emma Hinchliffe, following up our recent magazine feature with a conversation onstage at the MPW Summit. A lack of labor would trigger a "black swan event" for agriculture.
ON MY RADAR
Dawn Staley doesn't expect a female head coach in the NBA anytime soon The Athletic
How Hailey Bieber made Rhode into a $1 billion success story Wall Street Journal
MacKenzie Scott shrinks her Amazon stake by $1.6 billion Bloomberg
PARTING WORDS
"I didn't grow up thinking I would get half a chance at this."
—Outgoing GSK CEO Emma Walmsley, speaking at Fortune MPW about her time running the British pharma giant—and how it's "obnoxious" for CEOs to complain about how hard their lives are
