Fortune 500 CEO, Wife and Mother
2012
It’s official. Marrisa Mayer, recently appointed CEO of Yahoo, gave birth to her first child earlier this week. Mayer raised quite a stir last June, partly because at the age of 37, she is the youngest female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but even more so because she was seven months pregnant when she accepted the position.
This monumental undertaking by Mayer is being championed by many, who are applauding her for crashing the highest glass ceiling to further the cause of women, especially working moms in c-level executive positions. According to Forbes Magazine, women are still underrepresented at this level after fighting for equality in the workplace for fifty years. Fewer than 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and only one in five board seats are filled by women: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattsymonds/2012/08/08/10-traits-of-women-business-leaders-its-not-what-you-think/.
On the flip side, others are asking if Mayer has set the bar too high for working women. http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2012/10/03/marissa-mayer-had-her-baby-and-is-on-her-way-back-to-work-is-she-setting-the-bar-too-high-for-working-moms/
I see it differently. The women’s lib movement may have been grounded in a fight for equality in the workplace, but along the way we found our way to freedom of choice. We blazed trails for the next generation to make choices our mothers and grandmothers weren’t always able to make; most importantly our right to choose how our lives play out.
What works for one first-time mother, may not work for another. While some of us strive to be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, others simply want to be CEOs of their families; and the rest of us want to align ourselves somewhere in between.
Regardless of our superwoman personas, motherhood changes us, even as we insist it won’t right up to the moment we hold the baby for the first time. Still, each of us handles it differently based on our circumstances. Mayer announced her decision to return to work within a few weeks after childbirth, before she even experienced motherhood for a day, as if making this decision is akin to having minor surgery with nothing left to do but remove the stitches.
After all, women throughout time have delivered babies and gone right on with their lives. She can afford to “hire the village” that will free her up to keep her commitment to Yahoo. Still, whether she admits it in a public forum or not, she will likely feel the tug on her heartstrings as she juggles her own balls in the air for the next eighteen years. Regardless of how the process plays out for her, she will find a way to align her career and family priorities, or she will make different choices.
I knew I wanted to have it all – career, marriage and family – when I was eighteen. That goal unfolded through the seventies in a relatively traditional fashion with marriage at twenty-five, two kids and a middle management position by the age of twenty-four. I managed to juggle the balls in the air until my boss offered me a promotion to Vice President as our company was gearing up to come out of the recession in the mid- eighties. And, just like Mayer I accepted the position knowing I would have to start two weeks after I delivered my second child.
Like so many women of my generation, I wondered at the time if I had made the right choice; if my kids would be scarred as adults because I didn’t stay home; if my marriage would survive; if I would be a good role model for other women.
Looking back I have no regrets and neither do my kids. I found great caregivers and I was selective about how I allocated my time outside of work; my top three priorities were always my kids, my husband and my career. Beyond that I allocated time, if there was any, as I could.
Those of us, who chose motherhood and career at a time when there were no guarantees, blazed the trail. We survived, none the worse for wear, so Mayer and her generation can choose whatever level of the corporate hierarchy they want to aspire to. They’re carrying on, where the prior generation left off, to create the next phase of a revolution that still has many more trails to blaze.