New Yahoo! CEO is 37 ... and pregnant!

Agree with what Versatile said but am wondering if there is a legal responsibilty to disclose.

I know some compaies make officers undergo routine physicals, curious if a CEO would have to as well.

 

I'm sure that she had to have a physical for, at a minimum, whatever insurance they are providing for her. That would not take place until after she was hired and, in any event, would be confidential and not shared with the Board.

Many companies provide extensive annual physicals to execs just trying to keep them healthy. Results would also be confidential.

I don't think there are any circumstances that the Board could have legally compelled her to tell them of the pregnancy.

 

I wonder what direction Mayer will take Yahoo!? It's focus was on content, but it hasn't brought in revenue, and it has been weak in Web services besides email. Flickr had great promise, but Yahoo! did little with it. It isn't a search company and hasn't been for at least 10 years.

I'm sure the board is looking for Mayer 's penchant for attention seeking to bring good press to the company and buy it time to redefine itself once again.

 

My understanding is that in her engineer role, she came up with most of what people like about google.

On the morning joe, the cnbc guy offered up some advice on how she should stay at home for a few months with the kid. Mika came pretty close to coming unglued but kept it together on air.

 

That's true, Ragu, but the fact that the number is a record high and trending up is a sign that growth has been in the works for a long time. I don't think attention really focused on it until the early '90s with Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill, Packwood etc. And you can't just pluck people out and make them CEOs, you have to have them in the pipeline.

Also many/most of the female CEOs are in the tech world, particularly in companies that didn't exist before the 1990s and wouldn't have an established male-dominated culture to begin with.

One other thing about Mayer: She seems remarkably young for an outside hire. You see CEOs who started their companies or were an early employee, but typically the outside hires are more traditional business folks who are in their early to mid 40s.

 

I've been with my company since late 1995. When I started, the women VPs were always in areas like HR/Communications/Government Relations - "soft" areas with no revenue responsibility. I did see more women moving up outside of these traditional areas in our media businesses and financial service businesses in the late 90's.

Today, as I mentioned in another post, there are women in our industrial businesses who are leading business segments, essentially CEOs, with revenues as big as Yahoo's. They did have to work through the pipeline. They aren't going to be captured in the statistics of Fortune 500 leaders because, while our businesses may be as big as many Fortune 500 companies, they aren't stand alone companies. Maybe they've reached the glass ceiling. I think it's too early to tell.

As far as commenting about her looks? I decided I couldn't get upset about that one. Most male CEOs aren't too great looking. If I were on one of predominantly female boards talking about a new CEO who was very good looking, I'm sure we'd throw some comments about it into the discussion.

 

All kidding aside, I was surprised by her age more than her gender. 37 seems awfully young for a Fortune 500 CEO - male or female.

 

Hiring Mayer is not a head scratcher. Hiring Carol Bartz, who was 60 at the time, was a head scratcher for a company trying to reinvent itself (theme at Yahoo! since the mid 2000s).

 

Yeah, but as I noted, those guys started the companies. For outside hires, most of them are quite a bit older -- in addition to all the men, I'm pretty sure Carol Bartz and Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina were well into their 40s.

 

Yeah, I don't care what company she's running. All I know is she's provably, demonstrably hot.





BTW, in finding this photo, I came across Mayer's Google+ page (which might make me a stalker, but...). On it, she posted this:


Marissa Mayer
Jul 16, 2012 - Public

I'm incredibly excited to start my new role at Yahoo! tomorrow: http://pressroom.yahoo.net/pr/ycorp/236553.aspx


Is posting that on a Google site hitting below the belt?