Pregnant pause

WELL done, Marissa Mayer ( above), appointed chief executive of Yahoo, joining a handful of women chosen to head a top company in the U.S. The number of women running the most successful businesses there, the Fortune 500, runs at the same pitifully low level as the UK: just 4 per cent.

Marissa, 37, has an impressive track record — one of the original 20 employees at Google and their first female engineer, she is a workaholic who admits to spending 14 hours a day at the weekend on emails.

Feminists are divided about whether Marissa’s appointment is good news, because she’s expecting a baby in October and plans on working right up to the birth and returning soon afterwards.

In the UK, you can take up to six months ordinary maternity leave and are legally entitled to a year off work if you choose. Do you know many high- flying women who would do that?

Vicky Pryce, formerly married to chris huhne, is a highly successful economist, but admitted she returned to work at the financial firm KPMG after just three days off.

According to Vicky, she didn’t want to miss a big presentation she’d been working on for months, and claims: ‘ It was brilliant because it meant I actually recovered much faster than I did with the other kids.’

Vicky is in favour of quotas for women in the boardroom, something I have been banging on about for months, but which our ‘female-friendly’ PM seems very reluctant to do anything about.

The truth is, women like Vicky and Marissa only got to the top because they play by male rules.