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Caroline Fairchild
New Economy Editor at LinkedIn
How Marissa Mayer's Maternity Decision Affects Young Women -- Whether She Likes It Or Not
]For the past 24 hours, one topic has all but taken over my emails, coffee meetings, Twitter direct messages and even my voicemails: Marissa Mayer.
The Yahoo CEO announced yesterday that she plans to take just 14 days of maternity leave in December after the birth of her identical twin girls. As the founding writer of The Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on women in business, everyone was asking me for my take on the news. “Can you believe the example she is setting?” “What woman would ever work at Yahoo after this?” and (my personal favorite) “Is Marissa even human?” are just a few of the many questions that have been sent my way through various channels.
As a 25-year-old who still has the freedom of making decisions sans baby (nonetheless sans one toddler and two twins on the way), I by no means am an expert on this topic. I can't -- nor do I want to -- tell her how to parent. But I can tell you how Mayer’s decision affects me and, whether she likes it or not, affects the countless other young American women striving to attain what she has in their careers.
First, let’s start with some facts: There are just 25 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 and 27 in the Fortune 1000. While these numbers have mostly risen for the past decade and a half, the pace has been modest at best. Since the uptick of females in the C-Suite has been so slow, the likes of GM’s Mary Barra, Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, HP’s Meg Whitman and others find themselves in the spotlight more often than they undoubtedly would like. This couldn’t be more true when it comes to the topic of being a working mother. When Nooyi declared that woman really can’t have it all, the Internet exploded. When Matt Lauer asked Barra on the Today Show if she could run GM and be a good mother, people were talking for weeks.
Simply put: There are very few women tackling the demanding task of running one of the world’s largest corporations while having a family, so everyone is watching them do it. Mayer, as the embattled CEO of Yahoo at the relatively young age of 40, is watched the most. That’s what makes her announcement yesterday standout. As my former colleague Dan Primack pointed out in a friendly Twitter battle we got into yesterday, as the CEO of a major corporation Mayer is expected to announce her maternity plans.
Fair enough. But Mayer’s failure to acknowledge that such a short maternity leave is uncommon for working women is where I think she went wrong.
In her statement on Tumblr, Mayer made the two-week leave seem normal. “Since my pregnancy has been healthy and uncomplicated and since this is a unique time in Yahoo’s transformation, I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago, taking limited time away and working throughout,” she writes. This sends a signal to her colleagues as well as expecting moms everywhere that if you also have a “healthy and uncomplicated” pregnancy, two weeks away is just fine. It also sends a signal to young female professionals that if you want to take more than two weeks off when you have a kid, perhaps the C-Suite isn’t for you.
Yes, Yahoo has a very generous paternity policy, but culture is set at the top. Mayer -- like a boss who always misses his son's softball games and sends emails throughout the weekend -- is setting an inflexible culture.
This isn’t the first time that Mayer has refused to put any emphasis on her non-negotiable status as an influential female CEO. In 2013, AOL’s MAKERs asked her if she considered herself a feminist and she promptly responded no. “I certainly believe in equal rights and I believe that women are just as capable... but I don’t have the chip on the shoulder that comes with that,” she said. Perhaps Mayer believes that by not admitting that her maternity plans are abnormal she is ignoring that perceived “chip on the shoulder” that women in business carry. Yet what she is missing is that by ignoring it, she is in some ways furthering the problem: She is making what she attained look unrealistic and perhaps deterring young women from aspiring to be CEOs.
Do I think it’s fair that the decisions Mayer and other female CEOs make are scrutinized differently? Certainly not. But in 2015, this is the reality that we find ourselves in. It wasn’t until 1998 that young American women like myself hadany female CEOs in the Fortune 1000 to look up to. Now, we have 51. Mayer, whether she likes it or not, is one of them. I am not advocating that she take more time off to appease the masses and I am certainly not encouraging her to hide her plans. What I am hoping is that she begins to understand that aspiring young career women like me are watching and taking copious notes. If she doesn’t, I fear the slow rise of women we have joining her in the C-Suite will continue along at this dismally slow rate.
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