Yahoo's new chief, Marissa Mayer stands as the role model for women
Marissa Mayer has blazed trails in Silicon Valley - as Google's first woman engineer, as one of its most high-profile executives when she oversaw its search business, and as a serious technologist who was also willing to show her feminine side.
Now she will blaze a new trail, as a pregnant woman taking the helm of a major public company.
On Monday, the same day she became Yahoo's chief executive, Mayer wrote on Twitter that she and her husband, Zachary Bogue, a financier, are expecting a baby boy, their first child, on Oct. 7.
Part of the reason that Mayer is an anomaly is her age, 37. Most executives reach the top level later in their careers, after their childbearing years. Just 20 companies in the Fortune 500 have women chief executives, and all but three of them, including Mayer, are over 50.
Some people who study women in business were reluctant to discuss Mayer's pregnancy, saying that it is irrelevant to her ability to run Yahoo and that the children of male chief executives are not news.
"Many of the women CEOs of major corporations like Yahoo have children, and pregnancy is a short period in one's life," said Toby Stuart, director of the entrepreneurship center at the University of
California, Berkeley Haas School of Business, who has studied gender in the tech business. "Among career-oriented professional women, relatively late pregnancies are common."
But others said that by taking a powerful job while she is expecting a baby, Mayer is a role model for working women.
"We finally have reached a point where a woman could be pregnant and stepping into that kind of big job," said Sharon Vosmek, chief executive of Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs. "Her age makes it exciting, not just because she's quite youthful but because she's also in this prime stage of life when so many women feel they have to step out or step back."
As a role model, Mayer is joined in the tech industry by Sheryl Sandberg, 42, Facebook's chief operating officer who often talks about how she balances work and family.
Mayer, who faces a big challenge in turning around struggling Yahoo, plans to take just a few weeks of maternity leave and continue to work while she is out, she told Fortune, which first reported her pregnancy.
Yahoo's board "showed their evolved thinking" by hiring her in the final months of her pregnancy, she said in the Fortune interview.
