I made some remarks here a few weeks ago (on another article about Mayer) regarding her views on working long hours that were not well received. I'd like for this remark to service as a prime exhibit of why I have such a distaste for people who worship their work.
My wife and I were blessed with our first child last October. My employer was kind enough to supplement my paid vacation with a few extra days so I could enjoy those first few weeks just that much more. Turn that around and insist on cutting that time short AND pledging to work through it anyway? You're kidding, right? Her child isn't yet born and she's already two steps out of his or her life.
I sincerely hope the remainder of her pregnancy and delivery does much to change her mind about the significance of this person who is about to enter her life.
From Wikipedia: "To encourage greater paternal involvement in child-rearing, a minimum of 2 months out of the 16 is required to be used by the "minority" parent, in practice usually the father, and some Swedish political parties on the political left argue for legislation to oblige families to divide the 16 months equally between both parents"
I can see many new male CEOs in the same position taking the exact same approach to any small surgery.
If MM performs very strongly in the CEO role, she will do more for her descendants as far as pushing half the human race into the candidate pool for leadership positions across the western world. We're leaving so much talent and perspective on the table by only picking white male leaders.
In most of the world, parenting is viewed as an important, demanding job. Motherhood - given the physical and mental demands not shared by the father - even more so. In the US it seems to be an inconvenience to everyone involved.
From a general point of view, I think it's Ms. Mayer's right (along with any other parent) to determine the lifestyle they think is most appropriate for themselves and their family.
Personally though, I think this is a horrible life choice that shouldn't be culturally supported. A child is not an acquisition that will accompany your life; rather a child is a commitment to you changing into a new life. It would be the same as deciding to move to a farm in Brazil. The expectation that you can move to a farm in Brazil and still be an effective farmer as well as a CEO (or whatever your current position is) would be laughed at as being hopelessly naive. It would also be taken as a given that your farm would probably suffer, unless you pretty much outsourced its operations completely.
Alas, that's probably what will happen in the case of junior Mayer - assuming hubby continues to work as well, which admittedly is a large assumption. As a society, we should discourage parenting at arms length, in the same way that we should discourage those not committed to child rearing from having kids in the first place.
It's a shame that one has to bring another human into this world that will immediately be disconnected from their parents in a way that others aren't. I think it puts us all at a tremendous disadvantage not to create this strong bonds.
I flagged this, for whatever that's worth.
That's a pretty big assumption.
Would she have been legally required to inform them before being hired?
http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yaho...
> 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.
Unfortunately, the end result is that someone gets screwed either way: either the child misses out on his mother's attention during the most crucial moments of his growth, or Yahoo gets a CEO who isn't focused on restoring Yahoo.
Your statement implies that a woman can not do both. I know my wife would strongly disagree. I suspect many others would too.
1) Steve Jobs took a lot of 'time off' over his last few years where he had to take a big step back. Apple could afford it because he dominated their culture even when he wasn't there.
2) I think the next year at Yahoo, if all goes as Yahoo investors would like, is more important existentially than the last year of Jobs tenure. I'm not saying the last year under Jobs wasn't big, but there is more pressure on her than Jobs had to do more to change the company.
(dons flame-retardant clothing)
If my math is correct, she is well into the second trimester and rapidly approaching the third.
(not trying to give any credibility to the statement about first trimester... just stating that she is not in the first trimester.)
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study requested by Chair Maloney and Representative John Dingell examined the pay gap amongst women and men employed in management occupations, and found that full-time female managers earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by their male manager peers. This figure accounts for many observable differences between male and female managers, so the remaining 19 cent gap between men and women may be attributable to discriminatory practices. The gender pay gap amongst managers remained persistent between 2000 and 2007, the most recent year of available data.
The pay gap is not limited to the private sector. Even within the federal government, which ought to be a model employer, a substantial unexplained pay gap persists. In response to a request by Chair Maloney and Representative Dingell, the GAO examined the gender pay gap in the federal government and found that women federal employees earn 89 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers.
After accounting for observable differences between men and women (including education, experience, and occupation), that gap narrows to 93 cents on the dollar. The remaining 7 cent pay gap may be attributable to discriminatory practices."
From Page 9 of this report performed in 2010 (PDF): http://www.jec.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=...
Women are making 7% in a way we can't explain, and is possibly still discriminatory for the federal government.
Women are making 19% in a way we can't explain, and is possibly still discriminatory for the private sector.
And to bonaldi: Discrimination is NOT one of the listed causes fo the distance.
Don't take everyone who says your numbers as wrong as not on your side. Sometimes its someone on your side who wants you to not sound like a misinformed ranter when you're talking with an informed person on the other side.
I dislike the fact there is probably discrimination in the works there, but in no way, is it "65c on the dollar" anymore and people who parrot that are just wrong at best and disingenuous liars at worse. Liars on your side, (which is the side of equality, which is my side too), makes it an easy target for ridicule and hard to engage those on the other side of the issue.
2. Is it, entirely, a myth? When I was in college we discovered that, being a state run institution, we could find out the pay of all the faculty members. The female faculty members were being paid consistently less than equivalently experienced male faculty members. After college, a good friend of mine was being paid significantly less than me (not 35% less, more like 15-20%), for essentially the same job, despite her having an MS to my undergrad degree. These are anecdotal, but outside of organizations with fixed pay bands (read: federal gov't in the US), these pay disparities do still seem to exist, though perhaps not to the same extremes.
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Even if you identify the remaining 7%, the pay gap will not be "fixed" until women are earning the same as men in actual dollars. And then we can start on ownership of wealth and seniority.
We have more than places to go, especially if we're still in a place where the treatment of women in software can be equated to the treatment of men in nursing.