Yahoo, the chosen web portal of the 50+ set (alongside AOL) and once a giant of the industry, has seen itself marginalized in recent years. While the search engine still generates an insane amount of traffic, the company just announced a second quarter earnings statement that was, at best, passable. Revenues of $1.08 billion fell short of an expected $1.1 billion and net revenues fell by 4 percent. While stock price has only dipped a nickel so far, Yahoo is a company that simply cannot afford to take it “slow and steady.” As users log more time at sites like Facebook and Twitter, they spend more time clicking ads on those sites. Yahoo’s revenue depends largely on clicks such as those, and they’ve gone from having over 15 percent of the online ad market to a mere 9.5; expect them to drop even lower. That’s not the only problem the once-leader of the industry is facing. Earlier this year, Yahoo faced more than a little drama over a CEO who padded his resume, and the company found itself directionless.
It looks like Yahoo has decided to address both issues with one solution: Marissa Mayer. Mayer was the first female employee at Google and the twentieth employee to be hired. Over the years, she has been a strong influence on Google’s aesthetic, favoring bold colors and clean space. Compared to Yahoo’s sensory overload of a website, Google is absolutely spartan.
Many news outlets are choosing to focus on Mayer’s gender, with the New York Times even choosing the unfortunate headline “Yahoo Chief’s Challenge? Corner Office, New Baby“. While the article makes several good points about the role of women in modern business (spoiler: the Times is for it), the article is one that would simply never be written about a male CEO who took a job with a baby on the way. The only way fathers get written about is if they chose to stay home with their kids, something that hasn’t been “news” in over 30 years.
The above strip was published in 1985. It could have run today.
Yes, childbirth is a far more immediate concern for a woman than a male, but the strong implication that being a mother would impact Mayer’s performance is laughable at best and insulting at worst. A famously organized and efficient person, it is doubtless that she’ll manage her family life with as much aplomb as she has her professional career. We shouldn’t even be discussing it.
Interestingly, most are ignoring the age factor here. As I quipped above, Yahoo is the internet for older folks. Most of the company’s users are people who started using them when it was #1 in search and never broke the habit. Much like I tease my parents for still having an AOL email address, a Yahoo account also implies age. Simply put, Yahoo is an uncool, “fuddy-duddy’ of a company. At 37, Mayer is a huge breath of fresh air. Like many in my age range, she grew up with the internet revolution and understands the average modern user far better than a 53-year-old Scott Thompson did. Indeed, in her role at Google, Mayer was an integral part of the Internet 2.0 revolution, making it more than just a tool for when you’re at the computer, but an all-pervasive part of our lives. As Mayer said to CNN back in April:
I’m not a woman at Google, I’m a geek at Google. If you can find something that you’re really passionate about, whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.
Passion is not a word many would use in tandem with Yahoo, and something the company has a dire need for. As a passionate techie with strong executive experience, Marissa Mayer may be the ideal person to rebrand Yahoo as more than the butt of “Google vs Yahoo” jokes.
While Mayer is right when she says the board of Yahoo “showed their evolved thinking” by hiring a pregnant person, the fact is that Mayer is a far more exciting hire for her abilities and her age than the status of her ovaries. I long for the day when everyone is evolved enough to realize that.
I just heard her being discussed on Bloomberg radio; she said her first 5 years at Google she pulled an all-nighter at least once a week. She was willing to talk about her mistakes (nearly rejecting the idea of Ad-Sense) as well as her successes!
Everyone ought to sit up and pay attention to the point Mordechai Luchins makes here: if the new hire was an incipient father, that fact wouldn’t get mentioned at all, in news stories discussing his fitness for the job and giving projections of what a new CEO can do for a company. This typifies attitudes in our culture that are detrimental toward BOTH genders; here’s why:
First, obviously, it brings up negative assumptions about a woman’s capability to do the job as well as a man, bringing in aspects of life that are nearly always discussed about professional women, and almost never discussed about professional men–and in the case of women, are always used as a “negative impact on her ability to do the job as well as a man would.”
Second, it assumes being a mother, *by necessity*, will interfere with a woman’s ability to do a job well, and that for men, being a father will *not* do so. It assumes that a woman’s time and attention will be divided between work and parenting; that a woman will require time off for labor, delivery, and recovery, and that she may require more time off for staying home with sick children later, etc.
I’d like for you to go back and re-read that second point paragraph… then think about this:
Why aren’t those assumptions made equally for fathers?
In this day and age, many men are stay-at-home dads; a great many more men share parenting duties with their working wives. Yes, some families still divide the duties between father and mother using the traditional “The man earns the bread, the woman stays home and manages it and raised the children” format—but this model is very much a minority. Let me stress this: there’s nothing *wrong* with that model; however, it’s also *not* the only model going, and it’s not the “best” nor the “worst”—it’s simply one model of several that families use in determining how they will live, raise children, and survive. By economics alone, many families simply *can’t* afford to be “single-income households,” but there’s more to other models than that:
In the traditional model, men weren’t *expected* to bond as closely with their children, or to have as strong a hand in their day-to-day care, as women. Some did so anyway, but I’d like to point out how the expectation tended to create an environment where men, in essence, weren’t *allowed* to do so: men who helped with chores, who did “women’s work,” were often chastised, teased, seen negatively. My point is, the cultural insistence that family duties had to be divided according to gender, didn’t just limit women, they limited *men*, too.
As women gained access to the general workplace, as girls were encouraged to think of careers for themselves, and as birth control allowed both men and women more choices on *when* they would have children and how *many* children they would have, the family dynamic changed. For a time, women who worked tried to do two jobs at once: their regular work, and their home-management work… but that resulted in a lot of exhausted women. In grappling with the new dynamic, women became vocal about this, and society began to grasp that, in households where both parents worked, both parents needed to share in the home-care and especially in parenting duties.
In turn, this opened the door for fathers to take on a larger portion of household management and daily parenting—and fathers began to realize that they’d been missing out on some very golden moments with their children in the past. They began to realize that as fathers, they had rights, too.
A new model has been slowly emerging, that in recent years has gained a lot of traction: households where parents share duties and work as partners, where they divide up those duties according to who has free hands, or who has a preference for what work, no matter what gender role was “traditionally” ascribed to that task.
I also submit that all across the board, from families where the father works and mother stays at home, to families where the mother works and the father stays at home, and everything in between, FATHERS have gained opportunity for greater interaction with their children, and have been given the chance to be “nurturing”—a role that in the past was a “mother” descriptor.
In light of all that, the fact that most media coverage about a woman hired as CEO of a major corporation stresses her pregnancy in that coverage, and makes it an integral part of the story, SHOULD shine a spotlight on two points:
1. Significant gender-prejudice still exists toward women in assessing their capability to do a job;
2. Significant gender-prejudice still exists toward men in the assumption that they should not, and will not, need just as much time away from work to parent their children, as women do.
I put it to you that FATHERS deserve as much time off when a child is born as mothers; that FATHERS should receive the same benefits (paid parental leave, guarantee of job when returning from that leave, and sick days to deal with sick children) as mothers. In fact, we need to STOP looking at it in terms of gender, and START looking at this kind of leave and job impact in terms of “PARENT.”
Now, you can look at this from the viewpoint of “bottom line” corporations who only see immediate effects and dollar signs—far too many corporations do so, nowadays, and it’s the same viewpoint that results in layoffs, unpaid leave, unpaid overtime, etc. OR, you can look at it in terms of the gold standard for employers: if you treat your employees well, respect them as human beings, and are loyal to them, nearly all will respond with loyalty to the company, a better work ethic, greater productivity, etc.
Our current economy is cursed with a majority of companies who have abandoned the gold standard (and longterm gain and steady growth) in favor of short term gain that abuses employees and treats them like cogs instead of human beings. It’s that very attitude that has been the greatest barrier to granting fathers *and* mothers the right to take care of their family and still be a valued employee. We need to change that.
Google and it’s pompous nerds need to come up with an asine algorythm to help it from forthcoming bankruptcy. Sell Google stock now, it has become detached from reality.