I've kept my mouth shut on the whole Marissa Mayer situation. She's a woman, the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company ever, and by all accounts could really change the game for women and mothers in the workplace. She is a badass. She, like many female business leaders and women in high level positions, has all the power and ability to make the choice to do something huge for all women and parents.
Instead, she has chosen to behave like a 60-year-old white man instead of a 37-year-old new mom. I think she is trying so hard to prove that being a mom doesn't make her a liability or define her, that she is taking it to an extreme and punishing everyone else along for the ride.
I'm not saying that you have to let your children define you, though that is what usually ends up happening in some small part for all parents. She took on the job at Yahoo! when she was 5 months pregnant and from the beginning has been pissing off moms all over the internet with her flip remarks about pregnancy and working mothers.
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She only took 2 weeks of maternity leave, just to prove that she could have it all. I am currently heading into year 8 of my maternity leave. She is the exception to the rule or maybe her priorities are just different than mine. But now, she has gone a step further in her crusade to win top CEO of the year. She has taken away working remotely from her employees. I guess she figures if she is going to be miserable away from her child, then so should everyone else. This memo was sent to all employees last week.
"Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home," says the memo from the human resources department. "We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."
So to all those poor schmucks who were hired with the agreement that they could work remotely, Marissa Mayer has flipped the script on you. Surprise! Yahoo's CEO has no time for a home life and her family, and so neither should you. Get your ass to the office and be miserable like the rest of us.
We live in a high tech world and moms are finally afforded the luxury of being able to stay home with their kids and work to do something they love, grow their careers, and contribute financially. She is taking all of that away. She is setting us back decades.
I thought we were past the place where women had to hide being mothers because it made us a liability at work, but Mayer is part of the problem why women have to hide pregnancies and whether or not they have children in interviews. She is the perfect candidate to forge women's rights (mother's rights) ahead, to make the work place more parent friendly; instead she is making things more difficult by doing this.
As a mother who works remotely, her memo pisses me off. It's great that she holds herself to such a high standard as a CEO, but maybe her employees' priority is their families and maybe that is why they took a job that they could work remotely from in the first place. Maybe she should consider her employees' feelings on the situation or she may find herself with a problem of employee retention–and that's not very business savvy. Let's hope other women in top positions see this and use it as an example of what NOT to do to set us back years.
I don't begrudge Marissa Mayer for wanting to be in the office and further her career. But I prefer she not throw the rest of us under the bus who want to be home with our families. Why should we be punished for wanting to be home with our families? I thought she was the poster child for women having it all or does that only apply to her?
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