By now you’ve heard that the new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, also happens to be six months pregnant with her first child.
I’ve been torn between two reactions:
1. Dang! That is so cool!
2. She’s only taking “a few weeks” maternity leave?
OK, I will try to suspend my disbelief. Maybe that will work for her. Maybe she’s superhuman, and she’s going to luck out with a healthy baby who sleeps through the night. Or maybe she has no idea what she’s getting into. At least, she doesn’t know any more than you or I did when we were pregnant with our first babies.
It will be interesting to see how the whole thing unfolds. I hope everything works out for Marissa Mayer. I also hope that other new moms at Yahoo won’t feel pressured by the boss’s example to cut their maternity leaves short.
I don’t envy the pressure Mayer is under. Some people are calling her a role model, while others are complaining about her taking any maternity leave at all.
Here’s one response to the announcement about her hire:
“Talk about lousy timing. She’ll be taking maternity leave when she needs to be at work. Yahoo has enough problems without a part-time CEO,” one commenter said…
[Quick aside: Last I checked a whole bunch of full-timers were steering the ship at Yahoo, and that hasn’t kept the company from losing revenue, market share, and talent. Can we stop acting like doing a good job requires consistently working long hours? After all, decades of research shows that working long hours quickly leads to bad decisions and negative productivity.]
Then I read this post that my friend Laura sent (Thanks, Laura!), by the ever-controversial Penelope Trunk: Marissa Mayer becomes CEO of Yahoo, and proves women cannot have it all
I found this part refreshing, even if I don’t agree with all of it:
…I’m so sick of people saying that women like Marissa Mayer are trailblazers when they take on huge corporate responsibility instead of taking care of young kids at home. Leaving kids at home so you can do a big job at the office is old news. People have been doing it for decades.
Marissa Mayer is very Sheryl Sandberg: smart, driven, hard working, a high achiever. She represents all the things that we celebrate in our culture.
Do you know what we do not celebrate? Staying home with kids…
Trunk points out that although many are calling Mayer a “role model,” she’s an anomaly. Most mothers would prefer to work part time than full time. (Can I have an amen to that?) A true “role model” for women would be a mother who works part-time.
Sure, Mayer certainly does not represent us all, but I hold out the hope that having more women in leadership roles like Mayer can only make life better for the rest of us in the long run.
And you have to delight in the image of a CEO running a big important meeting with her hands folded across her nine-month round belly. Or ending a meeting early so she can go pump. (I guarantee she will not be pumping in a bathroom or a closet as many of us have.)
Speaking of anomalies:
If fewer than 4 out of 100 Fortune 500 CEOs are women, what are the chances of a Fortune 500 CEO being a pregnant woman?
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
That bothers me most is that fact that even if she choses to go back to the job very early. SOMEONE will have to mother her child.
In America we lay alot of praise at the feet of people who take on the full-time responsibilities of running a company. I know it’s politically incorrect to say but this same “responsible” person is ready to blow off the full-time responsibility of raising a newborn her and her husband chose to create. Raising children is not considered “responsible” activities anymore — like running Yahoo is I guess.
Hopefully, she does not gloss over the difficult reality of her situation and a few months. Even with help, it’s going to be exhausting because seems like she would want to be a great mom, too.
Someone will have to PARENT her child, yes.
No—MOTHER her child. I am tired of people acting like mothers and mothering/maternal is an offensive word — yes, it’s mothering even when the dad does it.
Many men have a difficult time connecting with infants. Even moms do! That is just reality. Not all men are up to the task –even the good ones.
“If being a mother was easy fathers would do it” — Quote from The Golden Girls
How about some recognition that many progressive moms have progressive partners as well? This article does not address Marissa’s family unit or social support. Perhaps she is not alone in her parenting? Co-parenting, if handled properly, gives both partners a hith degree of employability while also allowing them to maintain dedication to domestic, un-paid labor. My spouse excels at home and in the workplace, as do I. Why? Because we are neither mom nor dad….we are two parents committed to fulfilling ourselves and our family to the fullest. Perhaps Marissa is in a similar arrangement?
That sounds ideal but does not do much to help employed women whose spouses are fighting wars, get divorced, die, are out of the picture for whatever reason.
Patting men on the back for helping still ignores the reality of what most women face — especially with newborns/infants. When kids are older we can agree that shared duties is playing out more and more often. It depends more on how the man was raised than anything else.
She’s going to do what all the high-level working women I know do. She’s going to hire a full-time, live-in Nanny to take care of her baby. She’ll schedule her child into her Outlook to make sure she has face time. She’ll spend a lot of time talking about how hard her life/work balance is even though she has more help than most people can even imagine.
I recently read an article about some reality TV/soap star who scheduled her children into her calendar. She spent every day from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. with them. Whew! One whole hour. She was being held up as a wonderful working mom who managed to get it all done. You know what she wasn’t doing? Raising her kids. In truth, that’s okay as long as she admits it, but she made it sound like raising her kids was the most important thing in her world — one hour a day, of course.
The women I admire most are those who admit that they cannot do it all and are paying people to do everything they cannot fit into their schedules. I remember reading somewhere that Sally Field and Julie Roberts both thanked their nannies when they won their Oscars. I can respect that. They recognize that they cannot do what they do without a lot of help. I’m not judging whether or not they should be paying people to do so many things. I’m saying I admire the inner strength that lets them admit they cannot do it all.
None of us can do it without help. The problem is the women at the highest levels — who are supposed to be our role models — rarely attempt to talk about how much help they have. They make it sound like they are doing it all and the rest of us are slackers.
An older post, but I just came across it.
I had such mixed feelings about the Marissa Mayer story. On the one hand I want to offer support and respect to her for doing what is right and best for her and her family. Who am I to judge the choices that others make? The sad truth is that there are many mothers working long hours who do not have the choice and who do not have the support she does. Can we talk about these families?
On the other hand, something just felt wrong about the whole dialog around a pregnant ceo. I think that the quote from Penolope Truck explains my discomfort – “Leaving kids at home so you can do a big job at the office is old news. People have been doing it for decades… She represents all the things that we celebrate in our culture….Do you know what we do not celebrate? Staying home with kids…” This is it – When we call Marissa a trailblazer we are simply applying the old male model of work-life balance to a woman.
The true trailblazers are the employers who are supporting their employees, male and female, in implementing flexible and supportive career positions.
Thank you for this post.