I originally wrote this post for Fistful of Talent (a recruiting & Human Resources website). However, this is truly a woman issue, and I’d like to share my thoughts on it with all of you.
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Bravo, Yahoo! Seriously, I applaud your company!
*standing ovations all around*
When I heard about Yahoo’s new CEO (Marissa Mayer) being six months pregnant, and only being 37-years-old, I just knew – this woman must be simply amazing.
Not only is she a girl, but she gets picked to be CEO with a maternity leave scheduled in her near future. Women everywhere can rejoice!
Maybe these vaginas don’t make us look so stupid after all, right?
Here are just some of her qualifications:
- 20th employee ever hired by Google
- Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services
- First female Engineer at Google
- Worked for Google for 13+ years
- Oversaw Zagat acquisition
- Sits on Walmart’s board
Yahoo and Mayer are being super cool about the soon-to-be maternity leave. Yahoo is moving the September board meeting to her, and Mayer is taking a shorter leave while working from home.
So you can imagine my shock, as I laid in bed sick yesterday, with a pile of used Kleenex surrounding me, watching Barbara Walters and Sherri Shepherd set working moms back about 20 years.
Know going into this, my mother doesn’t like that I’m about to rip into Barbara Walters since, in her opinion,“she’s a legend, and she’s kind of getting old so she probably doesn’t know what she’s saying anymore.” Okay, Mom, I’ll keep that in mind. Although, I doubt that’s the issue.
So here’s what happened on yesterday’s The View:
- The ladies discussed Suri Cruise’s choice in high heels (I cannot make this up, people).
- They then move on to Marissa Mayer, and Joy congratulates her on the new gig.
- Barbara expresses concerns about Marissa not properly bonding with her new baby without a proper maternity leave saying, “…THE FIRST FEW MONTHS… THAT’S WHEN YOU BOND… IT’S GOING TO BE VERY HARD FOR HER TO BOND.”
- Sherri Shepherd chimes in saying the short maternity leave just shows us, “… HOW MUCH TROUBLE YAHOO MAY BE IN BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, THEY DON’T HAVE TIME FOR HER TO HAVE THIS BABY, YOU KNOW… COMPANIES NOWADAYS ARE IMPAIRED.”
My brain went something like this: ????$%&^#!!??????^&%$$@&&*))&%$!?????
And then, surprisingly, Elisabeth Hasselbeck chimes in and saved all of their hind ends. Elisabeth cheered Yahoo and said it was a step in the right direction for women everywhere. Elisabeth, I actually 100% agree with you on this one.
Watch it for yourself (video courtesy of abc.go.com and my iPhone):
I think most of us working moms can agree, we’ve all worked from home on those maternity leaves in some capacity.
And I don’t really know a lot of women who have a “seat at the table” that stay out for a full twelve weeks. I sure didn’t.
As a matter of fact, we found out our Chevrolet franchise was one of the 800 General Motors franchises to be slated, all as I was pushing out my daughter.
Would you like to know how long my maternity lasted? 4 days. She was born on Thursday. I was working by Monday. Not full time by any means, but I was in meetings for a couple of hours here and there, logging in at home, and deciding which 84 people were about to lose their jobs.
Do I regret the super short leave? Nope. Not a bit.
I have the best nanny in the world for a reason. Is she raising my children? Sure, from 8:30am to 6pm, Monday – Friday. She’s become an honorary member of our family, and she’s a damn good mother. I already had complete trust in her before Lilah was born. Just like my company already had complete trust in me. By no means did they require my presence during my maternity leave. I insisted upon it. Jobs were at stake, and I knew these people better than anyone else in that room.
Little Lilah Paige Soleau had her very own “seat at the table”: a fancy Fisher Price swing, one you can plug an iPod into, was placed just for her… in the company conference room.
That’s the reality of powerful working mothers, Sherri and Barbara. We don’t have to be there. We want to be there. There’s no such things as work-life balance. It’s life-life balance. We make all aspects of our lives work together.
The market crisis didn’t stop for my maternity leave.
The Big Three didn’t stop for my maternity leave.
My company didn’t stop for my maternity leave.
And it doesn’t make me a bad mother for wanting to be there, wanting to keep doing a great job, for a great company. A company that I love.
How much trouble Yahoo may be in because they don’t have time for her to have this baby… Well WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD Sherri! People like these ladies discussing things that they obviously have no clue about really piss me off. Whe I had my baby I didn’t get paid leave; it’s not even an option where I work. Not only that but I wasn’t even out of the hospital when the managers started calling asking me when I could return. And I don’t have a job where I can do some work from home or being my child to work for a couple of hours. So I guess my company is impaired huh? They certainly are. If I need time off for a doctors appointment I have to give my job 60 days notice and even then they can deny the request 24 hours prior to the day requested. I wish people would take everything into consideration before they open their mouths. Someone like Sherri has no clue about someone living paycheck to paycheck on unpaid maternity leave that had to go back in two weeks to feed her family… Guess I didn’t bond enough with my kid and the company should be in trouble. I’m sorry I know this wasn’t very eloquent but it’s a hot button for me.
The fact of the matter is, this is a medical leave. If the doctor says it is okay for her to return to work,, Yahoo has nothing to do with that at all!
And furthermore, because I chose to return to work – it doesn’t make me a bad mother.
Bravo to Yahoo and Bravo to Meredith! It sounds like Barbara and Sherri were questioning this woman’s commitment to her child and her job. Don’t they see it just makes it easier for men to say this crap if we can’t stop saying ourselves. In the doctory world you will still hear the debate, “Why should the public fund the education of female physicians when they will only have 3/4 of the working years as male physicians, because they take time off to have kids?” I know, try and pick your jaw off the floor! People still really debate this shit in policy circles, like it’s a time warp to 1954. I had a baby and was back in residency seeing patients in 3 weeks. Most of the female physicians I know worked up until a baby fell out (sometimes in the OR!). There needs to be more options for both mothers and fathers to coparent, parent at work and find that life-life balance.
Sorry long post, but this crap is too personal.
I agree! When did having a child and working make us “less than” our male counterparts? Hell, even if I could afford to be a stay at home mom, or bond with my baby for a year, I wouldn’t. My kids and I are bonded just fine. We make it work!
And to hear WOMEN question it? Well, that’s just disheartening.
And guess what, docs – Men sometimes get sick and have to miss work as well for surgeries and all sorts of things. Really? It’s no different. It’s all family medical leave protected activity.
Maternity leave is a personal choice for the family. I was absolutely lucky that I was a stay at home mom and didn’t have to make that gut wrenching decision, but if I had, it would have been my choice and my husband’s to make.
It is the quality of time you spend with your family not the quantity. My children remember weekends playing games, everything from board to video games. We spend time together doing our hobbies and make the most of that time. I bonded with my children by spending quality time with them. They also remember homework with both their father and I present and helping.
Mrs. Mayer is a public figure and I understand why everyone feels the need to voice an opinion but ultimately if it works for her and her family then it is the correct choice no matter whose opinion is being voiced, correctly or incorrectly.
Exactly! Personal decisions are no one else’s business… Aren’t we past the point of attacking each other for our choices yet?
Agreed! My children get lots of quality time from me, our nanny, their grandparents, their father… we all spend quality time and so far they are all doing okay.
She is not less of a mother, and it is her personal decision.
GAH… You know what really bothers me about this? It is more of the SSDD. One group of moms judging another mother for how she chooses to be a parent. I think there are a lot of multi-level issues here that could really spark some interesting conversation just in the fact that they hired her (AWESOME!), that they are working with her so she can be the mother she wants to be (AWESOME!), and that fact that a lot of women in this country do not have the ability to make the choice that she is making (NOT awesome!). Why didn’t they talk about any of that instead of banging her over the head and saying she would not be able to bond with her baby. Some days it infuriates me, some days it makes me sick to my stomach, but today it just makes me shake my head.
I guess I didn’t bond with Paydin or Owen since I took a college class right after I had them. So Paydin was an indepent study and all I did was research and write a 10 page paper. Owen was an online 1 time a week but I did these classes while I was on maternity leave. Shame on the women on the view for setting us women back. We don’t take maternity leave to bound with our babies you twits we take to to heal from pushing out or having babies cut out of us. I know a women who goes back to work 1 week after her baby is cut out of her. Maybe people need to stop all these “mommy wars” and stop judging others and what they do to make sure their family and or job (which is like a family) makes it.
Sherri’s comment seriously made me go WTF?! So she obviously has inside information and she knows for sure that Yahoo “doesn’t have time for her to have this baby”…right? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?
Obviously, if they’ve hired her, and are working with her on this whole thing, THEY’RE OKAY WITH IT, and they have a very practical plan to deal with what’s to come concerning her and her pregnancy. Why can’t everyone else (whose business this is *not*) just calm the heck down and stop this awful, stupid, useless stay-at-home-mom vs. working mom debate?!
I love everything about this article. I could almost cry. Thank you. You are my new role model.
As a woman who owns a company and would one day like to have a baby, I believe that it does take extra work to balance both in your life, but it is possible. Clearly with what I am sure she is being paid that she can afford to have the help to handle her infants first few months of life. I am excited to see Yahoo embracing what has been looked at as a negative in the past. YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I think it’s great that she’s earned this position. I’d love to see her advocating for better maternity leave policies, though. It would be great to see women who make it into the “old boys’ club” speak up for the 99.9% (or whatever realistic percentage exists) of women who will never get there, rather than joining in with the status quo.
Both sides irk me – Sherri & co. reacting as though she’s failing her child by going back early (“Thanks!”, say most working mothers, like myself, who don’t have the option to stay home longer. Can’t count the times my more affluent co-workers have said, “Why wouldn’t you stay out the entire 12 weeks FMLA allows?!” Um, because I can’t afford it!) AND Marissa Mayer not acknowledging that she is setting a very visible precedent – one that says women don’t need a maternity leave longer than a few weeks.
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