Yahoo CEO’S millions make her a role model for no mom
As if we weren’t still dealing with the fallout from Anne-Marie Slaughter — the former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department who declared in the Atlantic that women can’t have it all, and who quit her high-profile job because her teenage son was in trouble — along comes Marissa Mayer.
Newly appointed the CEO of Yahoo and also pregnant, Mayer announced both her big news items simultaneously. “I’m incredibly excited to start my new role at Yahoo! tomorrow,” she tweeted on July 16, followed by, “Another piece of good news today — @zackbogue and I are expecting a new baby boy!”
Curious way to refer to one’s husband — by his Twitter handle. I wonder if she does that at home, too: “@zackbogue! Stop leaving your dirty socks on the floor!”
Anyway, Mayer was soon all a-Twitter about “a fun Yahoo layette set” she received from her co-workers. “Note the purple rubber duck,” she tweeted.
Mayer’s appointment has given rise to “4,000 newspaper articles ... variously judging her to be a heroine, a bad mother, a great role model and no role model at all,” writes Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for the Financial Times. Kellaway, who appears to be just as tired as I am of this endless succession of mommy role models hopping perkily off the assembly line, and of all the manufactured buzz around them, writes: “In the absence of any better way of measuring how we are doing, we compulsively engage in something souldestroying: we compare. We compare ourselves to Slaughter and to Mayer...”
Among the 4,000 articles about Mayer are some accusing her of being naive and unrealistic because her maternity leave will be of a few weeks duration and she plans to keep working through it. That’s kind of puzzling. If you’re working the whole time, then it’s not really a leave, is it?
Then there are others full of dewy-eyed admiration because at last, the pundits have found a mother who is going to show the world how women can have it all!
Yes, well, if you’re being paid a gazillion dollars a year, neither you nor @zackbogue is going to be getting up five times a night to feed, change and soothe a colicky infant. No. You and @zackbogue are going to pay somebody else to do it @yourmansion.
A headline in The Guardian mused: “Do Marissa Mayer’s maternity plans make her a fit role model for women?” Beneath it was a point-counterpoint argument by writer Julie Llewellyn and Siobhan Freegard, founder of a website called Netmums. Llewellyn posits that women who take extended maternity leaves harm their future careers as well as the careers of other women, while Freegard talked about how women shouldn’t worry about “what being a mum may do to their pen- sion fund.”
Both of these women missed the point, which is that until Mayer was rocketed to the top spot at Yahoo, she did not occupy any exalted spot in the average person’s consciousness. Marissa who? Never heard of her — and now she’s a role model?
According to the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo’s offer to Mayer means she will deposit @herbank her base pay of a measly $1 million, plus up to $4 million in bonuses, $12 million in equity awards, a one-time make-whole payment “for stock left behind at Google” of $14 million, and “retention: $30 million.” It kind of makes you want to do something in feeble protest, like renounce your Yahoo e-mail address or something.
Just whom is Mayer a role model for, except possibly other equally rich women? It’s only in the faintest hope of landing that kind of money that the rest of us shell out a few bucks once in a while for a Lotto Max ticket.
Besides, I don’t think her plan to interrupt bonding with her new baby to reply to the latest message on her BlackBerry is very role model-ish at all, or worth emulating.
And frankly, who cares what Mayer does?
When it comes to being a working mother, you are your own role model. Go for it — and stop destroying your soul by comparing yourself to others. Mayer isn’t comparing herself to you, is she?