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Subscribe to RSSMarissa Mayer, the Yahoo! CEO and president who famously returned to work two weeks after giving birth last fall, said her job and baby are all she has time for these days.
TODAY
Marissa Mayer came on TODAY Wednesday, and talked motherhood and work.
“There’s not a lot of room for anything else,” she said Wednesday on TODAY. “Overall, I’ve been having a terrific time with both being a mother and with being a CEO.”
Mayer was named Yahoo! CEO last July, along with the news that she also was six-months pregnant. She then ran into controversy for her decision to come back to work only two weeks after giving birth to her son, now four months old.
TODAY
Marissa Mayer is the country's youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
“I wouldn’t have missed a minute of either experience. They both are great,” she said. “It does take a lot of focus. You need to make sure you’re really prioritizing that.”
At 37, Mayer is the youngest chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. She appeared on TODAY to unveil a new design for the Yahoo! home page.
“I’ve had a ton of fun coming into the company,” she told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie.
She said she spends her attention at work focused on Yahoo's extremely loyal users. She spends less time on the public’s attention to her as a role model for working mothers.
“I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking looking at it or even thinking on it. I’ve really been focused on the products, what we need to do,” she said.
More: The new Yahoo! design: What's changed?
What to expect when he's expecting
Social media profiles replacing resumes in the job hunt
On love, marriage and awkwardness around the office
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My guess, She is not exactly a model mother. She probably has a nanny that is raising her child.
A terrible boss as well. She has a reputation for trashing people on petty jealous issues, and filling the executive ranks with her friends. If you tell her something she doesn't want to hear, you're history.
And I heard the opposite, that she is a wonderful boss with excellent people skills. Perhaps people are just jealous of her success and the fact that she is the youngest CEO of a fortune 500 company ever.
It's quality of time and QUANTITY of time that babies/children need. We have a large number of sociopaths running around who because they got no time with loving, empathetic parents, have not developed that emotional ability. Babies are giving birth to babies and not caring for children. Here is a woman who gave birth and then dumps her kid off onto someone else to raise. I just hope that whomever that person(s) is, he/she does at least have an empathetic/sympathetic/ethical comportment.
"I've had a ton of fun"
Um, you're not hired on as an extremely highly-paid CEO of a failing company to have "a ton of fun". You're there to WORK and to turn around the company. You can't do it? Get out. And, just rearranging mobile apps and retooling a home page is not going to do it.
She got lucky at Google. Not luck? Prove it - make Yahoo the new Google. Let's save all the kudos and "youngest female CEO" bragging rights for when she's saved the company and stopped laying off REAL workers.
Feel sorry for the child. Raised by an army of nannies, I'm sure.
I'm sure it's super tough staying focused when you can hire full time help to care for your kid. Let's get some articles from REAL women who juggle work and their kids.
So she's not a real woman because she makes more money than you?
Also, who says she has nannies (other than random commenters who don't know the woman)? She does have a husband, maybe he stays home with the baby?
I follow this closely. I see a talented lady with a detailed style of thinking but without originality. This is true of most geeky people. She is enormously overpaid, but that is the way if the industry. She is here in this job because of one greedy board member who engineered the whole thing and has profited greatly.
If she does not work out, he really does not care. Also there is a large controversial judgment which is never mentioned. So far the hype of this lovely smart successful fem is carrying the day, but where is the beef?
This article is sooOOooo special [sarcasm]! Must be a slow news day...as this is "not" news, but simply fluff!!
What a terrible interview.
It's wonderful she is having such a great ride. I wonder what her employees really think, though. You never really get that from a media report. And if you did, would it be unbelievable job security protecting lip service or what they REALLY think?
It is HER maternity leave and HER decison when to return to work. What about the moms who LEAVE work early and CALL-OFF work?
I applaud NBC news for going out of their way to find someone who can successfully hold down a full time job and raise a child. Well done. Please provide more inspiring examples of how the 1% lives. This is entertainment at it's finest.
Entertainment is the correct word! Real people who don't make CEO salaries, have nannies and chef's and all the perks being a CEO brings, do what she does everyday and no one is putting their names in the news and giving them kudo's for the job that they do...
Give me a break... they still 'woohoo' her for 'going back to work so soon after birth'.. seriously? If she would've been going back to work as a waitress or the regular mom who has to get up with the kid instead of a nanny I would be high fiving her too but she has never mentioned all the people that she has helping that 'regular folks' don't. I'm sure she never had to drive 'into' work..the work probably came to her in between her naps.. I'm sure her chef and housekeeper worked around her needs and I'm betting the nanny was the one who got up at night so she got a full nights sleep. The day she admits that she didn't 'go back to work' the same as other moms would have to then I'll admit that she's 'focused and determined' as she called herself in one interview.. thats all she said you have to be.. how wonderful of her ..
I juggle a full time job, full time mom, with kids who are involved in sports and other extracurricular activities without a nanny. I am lucky that my mom can pick my kids up from school. I still have time to make dinner, clean the house, do the laundry, get them to practices, and go to their games. Granted I do get help with rides if kids need to be at two different places at the same time. But she is only doing what thousands of other moms do everyday. I joke that I work 17-18 hour days 7 days a week but I wouldn't change it for the world.
She sure messed up today allowing the horrible change to the Yahoo portal. So, I came to NBC for my home page after 13 years at Yahoo.
"CEO and president...said her job and baby are all she has time for these days." Well I guess there won't be any more kids anytime soon, LOL!!
I guess we will be forever 'hoarded' by articles about powerful women, in large and in charge, you go girl nonsense when the butch dykes in journalism just keep on plodding away....can't they come up with anything else?
The ironic part is, it's people like YOU that make it necessary to have "you go girl" articles. Guess what, Jerry? Women DO deserve the same opportunities, treatment, and, yes, kudos, as men. Get over it.
I am so sick of this woman and her mommy story. She is/was wortheless. They hired her as a figure head to use for publicity. No one likes her, she is crazy and just wants to play celeberty, and it is the other people playing the chess game that have the company doing better. Her work day is riding around from interview to interview in her limo, ordering people to get her more moca lattes, and shopping for shoes. They could have hired a successful woman CEO, but no, this was for the photo shoot, and mommy stories.
Another crummy CEO at the world's crummiest IT firm.
FAIL!
She's a liar too.
She lied in that interview. If she spent each day "focused on Yahoo's users", then the web-based email system wouldn't have the enormous number of problems it has (and has had for months now).
Her - or someone at Yahoo - would also get back to the users who've left numerous complaints on Yahoo's FB page....where they currently sit ignored.
Now I understand why Yahoo has such lame news and opinions.
It's so exhausting being a working parent while maintaining a marriage and a household. Something always have to give. If my kids are happy and I'm doing well at work, I probably have a massive pile of laundry in my house somewhere. If my house is sparkling clean, my husband probably feels neglected. Apparently some women can do it all, but I don't. I can't. Leaving my kids each morning is the hardest thing I have to do on any given day, and the guilt is immense. On the other hand, when I was on maternity leave and not contributing to the finances of the house, and all the pressure was on my husband, that guilt was immense, too. It's just the plight of the woman nowadays; there's never enough to go around, and some *ahem* women simply don't have their priorities in the right places.
All of that was kind of a tangent, but I bet I would feel a lot better if I could pay someone to clean my house while I'm at work. It would relieve a ton of stress just to be able to come home to a clean house and not have to roll up my sleeves and get to it as soon as I walk in. I'm guessing the woman in this article is a little misguided about what it really means to do it all.
Well said!
When my son was born, my wife had a scheduled C-Section. So she could focus on healing, I took all the nighttime feedings, going so far as keeping my son out in the living room with me, getting up when he would stir and silently getting a bottle ready so he wouldn't disturb my wife. This would occur 2-3x a night...every night.
Keep in mind that I still held down my 80+ hour a week job as Director DBMS while doing this. I did hire someone that would take care of my wife and our little one while I was in the office (for fear that too much bending and lifting would rip/tear apart my wife's midsection) but as soon as I got home, the sitter headed home and the house and family was mine to care for. Dinner, groceries, laundry, feedings, cleanup, etc. it was all on me.
You can be certain this person has a personal chef, a nanny, and anything else at her disposal so that she only has to participate as she needs to, and when any distraction in life arises, the baby is pushed over to the care giver.
(Not to mention, and this comes from personal experience as well...there's no way she's pulling an executive-level workload and barring the brunt of the house and family duty - look at her eyes. You can throw all the concealer you want to on it, when I did it, averaging about 3-4 hours of crappy sleep a night...every night - my eyes (underneath) where DARK purple, almost scary looking - and the mass amounts of caffeine that it required to maintain that schedule...I added about 50lbs pretty quickly.
I'm pretty sure that juggling mother duties and CEO duties is much easier when you have $200M at your disposal. That's what her estimated worth is. Doing that with a middle class salary / net worth is much, MUCH more difficult.
Yahoo is at position 483 in the Fortune 500. Soon enough, she will be on the most powerful women in the Fortune 1000.
Not a single article mentions that she dated Google founder and billionaire Larry Page for three years until 2005 while working at Google. In 2006, she was promoted to VP.
I always read the articles about her and I always read the comments. And then I sigh.
Why is it so hard to appreciate that someone lives a different life than you do and commend them for it? I'm not saying that any of your lives are less important than Marissa's, but she IS in the public eye, so we read about her. No one is discounting or discrediting other mothers or other lifestyles. Why are we discrediting her? Yeah, she probably has help with the housework. She may have a nanny. So? Just because she raises her child differently than you do does NOT make her a bad mother and does NOT make her "not a real woman." PLUS who even knows if she has nannies?? She has a husband. She probably has other family members. Maybe Daddy or Grandma watches the baby while she works, just like in THOUSANDS of other households!!
Maybe I'm just not a fan of faceless judgmental know-it-alls. But I'd rather not judge Marissa until I have all the facts. And even then, I probably won't judge her, but look at her as living a different life than mine, commend her successes, and move on. It saddens me that people would rather tear each other apart rather than lifting each other up.
I don't understand why everyone gets their panties in a knot over a woman who has chosen to work. Of course she has help around the house - she's got a multi-million dollar career, and can afford to do so. I am sure she didn't go to college just to be a stay at home Mom, and since it's her personal choice, why should it matter to anyone, unless the child is being ill-cared for or neglected, which doesn't seem to be the case.
OMG...this is the most fascina......oh wait a sec.....I forgot.....I DON'T GIVE A SH*T. Why don't you focus on THAT.
I am VERY disappointed in the Today Show! You commend this individual who gave lip service to how much her users meant to her! BULL!!!!!
If you had done your research, you would have found that Yahoo email was hacked at the end of January. For those of us whose email account was hacked, I would question Yahoo's concern for their users. They won't answer their phone (IVR system). You are told to go to their website. In one instance I actually got through to a human and as soon as I told them what the problem was (my email had been hacked and someone has control over it), they hung up on me. When I go to their web site, I get no response or if I get any response, it's a run-around. I have yet to get help fixing the issue. It's been almost a month now. If I did my job like this, I'd be fired!
Why don't you report on these types of issues vs. praising someone who clearly doesn't give a @#$# about her users. If she did, she wouldn't allow this kind of service.