Yahoo CEO gives birth to son

The appointment of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO drew keen attention in many aspects on July 16. For one, she was the ex-vice president of Google. Rumors abound as to why Mayer, one of Google`s 20 core executives, chose to take over Yahoo, a rival company in crisis. Another attention grabber was her relatively young age of 37. The IT sector tends to prefer younger employees but for a company to recruit a 30-something person as a top manager is considered bold. The average age of a CEO at a large U.S. company is 55.6.

Moreover, Mayer was nearing the end of her pregnancy when she was appointed Yahoo CEO. Despite this, Yahoo board recruited her, which reflects the company’s commitment to judge her solely on her capacity and not whether she was almost due. She is an “expensive mother” who will be paid 100 million U.S. dollars over the next five years plus stock options as compensation. Giving birth to a baby boy Sunday, she is now the world`s most famous working mom.

Yahoo, which has seen its share price halved over the past five years, is nicknamed “the burial place of CEOs.” Five CEOs resigned over a period of one year. Scott Thomson was pressured to quit due to controversy over the alleged fabrication of his academic background four months after his appointment despite drawing high expectations. The company has also had an acting CEO. This means Mayer bears tremendous responsibility to revive Yahoo. Critics expect she will fall off a “glass cliff” rather than breaking the glass ceiling because Yahoo is facing such a serious crisis. A glass cliff refers to a situation in which a woman takes over a high-risk project or post that has a high a chance of failure as men decline to take on that challenge to prevent becoming a scapegoat.

Mayer is an engineer-turned-CEO, a rarity among top female managers. She was in charge of revamping Google`s homepage and designing and developing the search interface, Gmail, Google News and Google Image. Critics doubt that Mayer, who was mostly responsible for technical work, can successfully manage a large organization like Yahoo. She has since added another important responsibility: motherhood. The world is paying attention to her childbirth and if she can successfully juggle both work and family. If she pulls it off, this could help erode gender discrimination against women.

Editorial Writer Chung Sung-hee (shchung@donga.com)