Marissa Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo. This alone is a newsworthy item; a female CEO of a Fortune 500 company? How many female CEOs in the Fortune 500 do you think exist?
As of May 9, 2012, a grand 18 (link to CNN article). Now at 19 with Marissa Mayer (unless someone else snuck in there and my research didn't unearth it).
Let's recap -- the Fortune 500 has eighteen female CEOs. Quite a paltry percentage.
But Marissa Mayer's CEO status practically seems secondary compared to the rest of the news; she is pregnant and due in October.
"Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in late June, in a meeting with Michael Wolf, a member of the board's four-person CEO search committee. A meeting with the search committee followed, and then Mayer met with the full board last Wednesday. None of the Yahoo directors, she says, revealed any concern about hiring a pregnant chief executive. "They showed their evolved thinking," says Mayer, who got the phone call last Thursday that she was the board's choice to be CEO." (source)
First, hats off to Yahoo, for hiring a woman that will obviously be taking maternity leave so soon after starting her role as CEO.
Second, I hope that other companies take note of Yahoo's ability to hire a person based entirely on qualifications -- Marissa has an amazing employment history, having been for example Google's first female engineer and a VP -- having not become swayed in a negative direction by her pregnancy status.
Third, I wish every article praised Marissa Mayer for her achievements, and Yahoo for hiring her, solely because she is smart and awesome and determined, and perhaps only noted in some tiny buried footnote that she is pregnant. Women give birth every day, they go to work every day, and they take maternity leave every day (unless, of course, you work for some crappy company that doesn't give two cents about whether you have time to recover from childbirth or bond with your newborn). I wish we lived in a world where the fact that a new CEO (i) is pregnant, (ii) will soon give birth, and (iii) will take time to recover/bond/etc. (she mentions it will be a few weeks of leave) warrants little or no mention at all, because the world should understand that women do get pregnant, give birth, and take leave and life manages to roll on just fine without companies exploding into bankrupt messes.
However, I will gladly take the articles as currently written, with such an emphasis on her pregnancy status, if it makes others realize that it can be done and perhaps makes companies rethink current possibly discriminatory hiring procedures.
