Marissa Mayer Is Pregnant Again, and You Know What That Means
Marissa Mayer
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced last week that she’s pregnant with twin girls. Just as she did with her first pregnancy in 2012, Mayer wrote on her Tumblr that she’ll be “taking limited time away and working throughout” her maternity leave. Last time, “limited time away” meant Mayer was out of the office for just two weeks after giving birth.
First of all, congrats, Marissa! Second, we sure hope you braced yourself before publishing that post, because The Great Marissa Mayer Maternity Leave Debate: The Sequel has arrived, and it’s bigger and more contentious than the first installment.
Everyone who writes about women’s careers on the internet has something to say about the implications of Mayer’s decision, and opinions are pretty split. In one camp, there are the people who think Mayer is setting a bad example for her own employees (not to mention women everywhere) by not taking more of her company-allotted maternity leave (which, under Mayer’s watch, was increased to 16 paid weeks off in 2013).
In the other camp are the people who think Mayer should be free to decide what’s best for her family and her company, and the rest of us should just, ahem, butt out.
We see both sides of this one, so we’ve rounded up some opinion pieces below that summarize both arguments in case you’re also on the fence. Please let us know where you stand in the comments!
And regardless of where you fall, let’s all agree on one thing: if more women were CEOs of large companies, one woman’s motherhood choices wouldn’t be such a big deal—and we’d all be better off.
In the “Marissa Mayer Should Be a Better Role Model” camp:
“Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s 2-Week Maternity Leave Fails Women Everywhere”: Daily Dot
“Women Can Be CEOs and Mothers. But Marissa Mayer’s Maternity Leave Is a Bum Deal”: The Telegraph
“Marissa Mayer’s Two-Week Maternity Leave Is Bullsh*t”: Daily Beast
“Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Is a Symbol for American Working Mothers, Whether She Likes It or Not”: Business Insider
In the “Leave Marissa Alone” camp:
“Back off on Marissa Mayer’s Maternity Leave”: CNN
“Other New Moms Don’t Need to Follow in Marissa Mayer’s Footsteps”: Huffington Post
“Can We All Climb Out Of Marissa Mayer’s Uterus For Five Minutes?”: Scary Mommy
“How Dare Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Be Her Own Woman about Having Babies!”: The Guardian
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.