New Celebrity CEO at Yahoo, Hyper-Intelligent and Pregnant
It has been fascinating to follow the media announcement of the newly appointed CEO at Yahoo. Her name is Marissa Mayer and she comes from Google, the search engine company that was founded after Yahoo and quickly surpassed it. Mayer was one of the first employees at Google. Over the years, she ran Google’s search group and worked with successful products like Gmail. She is smart, detail oriented and very media savvy. Yahoo, on the other hand, has had 7 CEOs in the last 5 years, and is a company with problems, a declining market share and a demoralized workforce.
The comments that invaded the media are not about her excellent qualifications for the job but about the fact that she is 6 months pregnant and has announced that she will not let the birth of her baby interfere with her work. Mayer’s decision to stay working sparked a debate over women’s roles at work and at home, the pros and cons of taking a long maternity leave and the challenges of work/life balance. Some people think she has underestimated the challenges of motherhood, while others question her ability to bond with her baby if she continues to work.
Mayer may help break an expectation society still has of women, that they will be the primary caretakers of children. If she has her baby, continues to work and is able to turn Yahoo around, it will be a great accomplishment, and she will become a role model for many women. However her situation is not typical of most working women: she is rich, has a supportive husband, and can set up her own flexible schedule.
In the next 20 years there will be many more women like Mayer who will focus on their careers first and will have babies in their late 30’s and early 40’s. As a society, we need to support these women and their choices. Corporations need to create an environment that is work/life friendly, which will not only benefits women and parents, but also men and single people, since everyone needs to find their own work/life fit.
There are a number of initiatives a responsible company can take when trying to help its employees achieve a work/life fit. According to World at Work, a society for Certified Professionals, these work/life initiatives fall into the following seven categories: Dependent Care, Workplace Flexibility, Health and Wellness, Financial Assistance, Paid and Unpaid Time Off, Community Involvement and Culture Change. The key is to develop work/life initiatives that are tailored to the needs of the employees and the business.
