Lots of links on my Twitterfeed about Marissa Mayer this morning. Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo. And she's pregnant. She could be the first CEO of a publicly traded Fortune 500 tech company who is pregnant. Helaine Olen wonders if she's hit the glass cliff. Marissa Mayer says she isn't a feminist, because it is a negative word.
Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo
Apt. 11d 
Okay, I’ll bite….I just don’t see what is so amazing and incredible about this. She will have a team of nanny and support staff to run everything outside of her paid work – just the same as any male executive at this level.
I have nothing against her but am curious – do people see her as a role model? For whom? Other high flying executives?
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She is a role model, not just for what she’s doing now (which is of limited utility to those who are not multimillionaire CEO’s of major corporations), but for what she did before.
One of the Sandberg statements that stuck with me is the comment about women “leaning back” before they had to. True, I like the glass cliff analogy (taking charge of Yahoo seems an iffy proposition). But, she’s in a position to be able to take the risk, even at 20+ weeks pregnant. She might succeed; she might fail. But if she does, she has a good parachute. She can even decide that she’d rather work on her nursery or might need bedrest and then she can just quit.
She’s in the position to have all those choices because she didn’t lean back. She’s stayed in the game, presumably until she doesn’t want to play it any more. She was a techy kid who joined Google as employee #20. Making that choice, rather than worrying about joining a startup because she might want to have a baby in ten years yielded her great rewards.
That’s where I see the role model. It’s not a role model everyone would want to follow (waiting to have a child at 37 is a risky fertility path, unless your backup plan is no children). There have probably been other sacrifices along the way.
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Thanks bj.
Considering the fact that for most professionals, your peak earning years are in your 40’s, and 99.9% will never have the Google opportunity to subvert that by earning a ton a decade earlier, there’s still the question of how do you manage having a demanding career and a family. And if you do choose to pull back at some point, whether earlier or later, can you get back on track again?
She gambled with fertility (none of us ever think we’ll be that person who finds it a challenge to fall pregnant) and also gambled with Google. Both bets paid off for her but that doesn’t mean that they are learning points to take away for others.
I think that the main takeaway is to work your a** off in your twenties gaining expertise in SOMETHING that’ll give you a bargaining chip or make you extra marketable if and when you do have children.
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She’s doing it now, too. *She* could turn down the job, assuming it will be incompatible with her pregnancy or family (and it might be — she’s expecting everything to go right, and it might or might not). Or she can try, and quit when she knows it isn’t working. And, it’s meaningful that she’s being given the opportunity (even on the edge of a precipice) and not being told by others that she can’t possibly manage both pregnancy & being a CEO.
(BTW, I don’t like her, from what I’ve seen of interviews, starting with not calling yourself a feminist and going on to arguing that all solutions will be personal and not institutional, and the lack of acknowledgement of luck).
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But isn’t she really being told that she can manage both being a CEO and a pregnancy as long as the pregnancy doesn’t interfere with the CEO-ness?
What I am trying to get at is that it doesn’t seem like much progress if she can only operate in one mode – the traditional CEO model. That isn’t any different than any other CEO who has Dobby the House Elf or a full time spouse managing everything else.
I’m not saying that one CAN be a CEO without it being a 24/7 job – just that this seeming like progress is a bit of an illusion.
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She’s not the first female CEO, of course, but certainly the first with obvious family attachments that I can remember. Maybe, just maybe, her struggles with “having it all” will make her rethink whether institutional structures would help. I don’t know if there’s a non-traditional CEO model available, at least not at this level. Certainly a smaller company could have a CEO who works different hours, especially if she started the company herself. Many women have done that, specifically because that allows them to shape the culture and their schedules.
This will be interesting to watch, for sure.
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She’s not the first female CEO, of course, but certainly the first with obvious family attachments that I can remember. Maybe, just maybe, her struggles with “having it all” will make her rethink whether institutional structures would help. I don’t know if there’s a non-traditional CEO model available, at least not at this level. Certainly a smaller company could have a CEO who works different hours, especially if she started the company herself. Many women have done that, specifically because that allows them to shape the culture and their schedules.
This will be interesting to watch, for sure.
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Not casting any aspersions on her achievement of course – anyone who can do Google and now this must be amazingly talented and driven.
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