The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to

How do you think night scenes are filmed? During the day, in a building, with green screen and CGI? They have to film during much of the night. Even if a top star (like Tom Cruise or Christian Bale) can refuse to work more than 10 or 12 hours a day (I don't know whether even they set hours like that), they might be working one day and then the next day all night. That's not a family-friendly schedule.

Shooting on location is like a multi-week or even multi-month business trip.

A lot of things happen in nature. But is there a reason a women is required to raise an offspring? Apart from breast-milk, there isn't anything a man can't do.

> Is there any reason her husband shouldn't help her? I don't really see one.

No reason at all. I am more interested in parent's comment about woman required to take care of babies. Let alone helping, I don't see a reason why a man can't raise a baby all by himself.

That will give me a great deal of time to hack, play video games and practice my harmonica.

You seem to ignore my whole blurb about "being a father" and "holding a stressful job", and how it applies to the CEOs in question.

In particular it sounds like you're an adherent of Dr. Sears. There may be benefits to his techniques. But the whole goal is to have the woman paying constant attention to the baby - which means that the woman never can pay undivided attention to anything else. This does not seem to me to be compatible with running a company, even in the best of times. (Which Yahoo is not in.)

(A random snide remark about Dr Sears. A man with 8 children advocates a child rearing technique where all of the work is done by the mom. Coincidence?)

If I had to paraphrase the post, it would be "I don't think she realizes how hard it's going to be." Which is true, simply because NO PARENT, male or female, can truly internalize how hard parenting is until they're a parent. I was warned plenty of times and I still wasn't prepared--not by a long shot.

However, I can understand why people get defensive over this issue. When I took six months off to take care of my daughter (while my wife worked) I came to realize that:

a) You can get pretty self-conscious at times, especially when you see examples of people parenting better than you are.

b) Parenting can take up an INFINITE amount of your time and energy, if you let it. Children evolved to maximize their chance of thriving, and that pretty much means they will demand as much as you can give, and more, and then even more. It's just how children are. But that means that there's always some good bit of parenting that you potentially could do, but can't: either because there's no money, or because you're too tired, or because you have to work. So, in essence, mothers do choose between parenting and work, but they also choose between parenting and sleeping, and parenting and eating, and parenting and reading, and parenting and socializing. Heck, many times I had to choose between parenting and showering. However, while I felt guilty about my shower, I think that in the long term the kids will turn out OK. <g>

What is my point? It is no more or less than that childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll out of women. What toll it will take out of any particular woman is difficult to predict. In most cases the toll is far larger than the people involved expected. Any woman coming into motherhood, particularly for the first time, is naive if they think that they can plan to put motherhood in a box and be confident that it will actually stay there.

This is different for men. If a man with sufficient resources decides that he does not want his work to be impacted by fatherhood, it won't be. Whatever the cost to his family or the opinion of his friends, he really can ignore parenting and continue to work normally. I would not personally choose that, and men who choose to be involved with their children open themselves up for some of the same issues that women go through. But I am confident a high powered male executive who promises that has very low risk of failing to deliver on that promise.

You dismiss this by calling it bigotry. I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and biology. I think that having even a casual acquaintance with the facts, or having some personal acquaintances with some horror stories, puts me on solid ground to say what I did. (For example I know one woman who had problems with water retention that caused severe carpal tunnel. She was unable to pick anything up, drive, use a mouse or keyboard, etc for months. Good luck with that!) Calling me a bigot invokes a taboo, I'm a horrible person for thinking those thoughts, but it says nothing one way or the other on whether I am right.

All of that said, Marissa is a truly impressive woman. She brings a lot to the table here. There is a reason why she has triggered more discussion than anyone else in the previous parade of CEOs that Yahoo has had recently. Her pregnancy is an obvious risk factor for her, and it is silly to try to claim otherwise. But that is a risk, not a guarantee. Most women do not have particularly difficult pregnancies. Many women are able to balance babies and work. But you can't plan on this in any particular case. And she is likely to get a surprise about how much work it is.

Now let's turn to your attempts to personally attack me.

The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc.

It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything in her life. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU (one of the top medical schools in the country) earned with honors. Can you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship? If your answer is no, then you're in the same boat that I am. I have great respect for my wife.

My wife's opinions do not come from an inability to work hard. They come from her knowledge and experience of what motherhood can take out of women.

Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably ill-suited you as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?

Thank you for calling me young, at almost 43 I have not thought of myself that way for years. I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine.

As for my children, my wife is right now going through a medical residency. I therefore am a full-time parent who does part time contracting on the side. Sure, I spend time on NH and used to on SO, but you may rest assured that my children are not be compromised by that. (If you go back I said that having children has limited my ability to work hard, now you know why.)

(If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is very personal to female HN readers like me.)

Please stop projecting opinions on me that I do not have. Talk to what I am saying, and not the straw man argument that you think I said.

As my personal life makes clear, I not only do not believe that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work, but I am personally making serious professional sacrifices right now to allow my wife to achieve what she wants to achieve.

If this surprises you, then I highly recommend that you go back and read what I wrote to try to figure out what I actually think. Because what I'm saying really isn't that unreasonable.

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Update

I wrote that before your edit. Thanks for the kind words. I suspect that my opinions may be more equitable than you thought, but the opinions that you don't like are unlikely to change. They are not what I want the world to be, but are observations of how it actually seems to work.

On postpartum depression, I was looking for a condition that hits lots of women, and it was the first that popped into my mind, and the first link I found for it said 10%. Now that I look at it in more detail I find that there is disagreement on what it is and when people have it, on the frequency, and a lack of clarity on the causes. Indeed there likely are many factors that contribute. Many of the causes you'll find in the literature are tied to hormones and biology. Many are not. That was a bad example.

A better example would be Caesarian section. Caesarian sections are very common, and the usual recovery time for women is 4-6 weeks. Which is significantly longer than the 2 weeks that Marissa is planning on. Obviously being a CEO is not a physically demanding job, if need be she could do it from a wheelchair. But recovering from major surgery is likely to hamper her performance.

To the contrary. Tribes shared the responsibilities of raising children, including breast feeding.

This thing called Google returns results from the web, and any crackpot can have a page indexed. You are not required to, but the onus of citing is on you when you are making a claim which isn't known to the demographic in question.

> That said, the implication that a mother being close to a new born child is completely equal to a father being close to a new born child is PC ideology.

>> The NICHD study of Early child care was designed to assess the long term outcomes of non parental care giving

What relevance you non-parental care giving has to do with a father raising a child?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory#Recent_develo...

> Attachment theory describes the dynamics of long-term relationships between humans. Its most important tenet is that an infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for social and emotional development to occur normally.

Why are you quoting "maternal deprivation" when it is superseded by "attachment theory"? Attachment theory talks about "at least one parent" and your claims are mother is more important.

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breastfeeding#Connection_to_int...

>> (Correlation != causation of course, but the other causation for the effects here would be higher quality mother time, which also furthers the point)

You are conveniently ignoring the studies which didn't find causation or correlation.

> Call it wishful thinking, and it's not about "we are exactly the same or interchangeable". I am willing to be corrected, but I think a man by himself is capable of raising a child in a normal way(sans breast milk).

>> It still takes a woman to give birth to a child. And while a "man is capable of raising a child in a normal way", that doesn't say much. Also an orphanage is capable of raising a child -- or "the streets", as it happens in some third world countries. Maybe even wolves, if we believe this Mowgli story. But, some hundred thousands years of evolution say the child optimally needs two parents, female and male.

Now you are being simple, plain ridiculous. Did I question it takes a woman to give birth? What purpose that bullshit about woman required to give birth serve?

And the bit about orphanage and streets? A father raising a child is analogous, right?

And thousand years of evolution says a child optimally need two parents? Now you are simply pulling things out of your ass. Do you even know what evolution means?

> That said, some people consider a child a vanity accessory one can just buy for himself --or had it delivered. From my not-so-PC standpoint, I'd call those people selfish consumers that deserve to be mocked, but sadly aren't as much as they used to be:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c

More hyperbole. I didn't click the link. I didn't put forward the argument about child being an accessory, and have no interests in knowing about your solid refutations to the points I, or no one else here made or implied.

Your disclaimer about not being PC compliant is getting irritating. That not being PC compliant disclaimer comes into play only after you are correct(and no, quoting correlation as absolutes isn't being correct). If you aren't correct, being PC or not means shit.

That's a crazy attitude. If you make statements that are not generally known by the community in question, you should back what you say up. Not expect every single person who reads your post to fact check you or (worse) blindly accept what you say.

This attitude just encourages wild, unverifiable statements.

Which one? Examples without mammals that breast feed their offspring which a male in mammals can't do?

Or did you mean elephants, "The females spend their entire lives in tightly knit family groups made up of mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant

so we should raise our chilren in tightly knit groups and drive the males away?

Should we throw marriage out because nearly no mammals have long monogamic relationships?

"Plus, when we are faced with some thousands of years of history, common worldwide family patterns, and similar observations in nature to that effect"

Your lack of citations seems to be a modus operandi.

I'm not going to say that they shouldn't have had the child because there is no point, they can't change the past. However, I would tell people who are planning to do this that they shouldn't have children.

There are plenty of children who are raised in poor environments who go on to lead normal lives. There are some children who are raised in front of the television with almost no parental involvement who end up perfectly normal.

Just because some children overcome a bad environment doesn't mean it should be socially acceptable to purposely introduce a child to a bad environment that you could have easily corrected.

There is loads of evidence that failure to properly bond with a primary caregiver causes significant problems later in life.

What is the likelihood that a paid servant will love, and develop a bond with your child. What is the likelihood you will be able to keep the same nanny long enough for her/him to bond with your child? Because if that doesn't happen, and you see your child less than 1 hour a day, you are demonstrably harming your child and the society that eventually has to deal with him or her.

If you have no interest in raising and nurturing your child, the only possible reason for procreating is selfishness. Children aren't pets.

>That's your opinion and I'm guessing it's based on cultural expectations, nothing more. Your culture is not everyone's culture.

There have been cultures where throwing baby girls in garbage dumps was acceptable, is that an argument for the moral validity of infant exposure?