Yahoo’s selection as CEO of 37 year old Marissa Mayer, a self described Google “geek” and one of it’s original employees ,  brought to a record 19 the number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies,

Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mayer joins an even more elite group of women CEO’s in the tech industry including Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Virginia M. Rometty, the head of I.B.M., Sheryl Sandberg COO Facebook.

Mayer’s heady new position is fraught with both opportunity and peril.  Mayer is stepping onto a path where others have gone before and failed:  Mayer takes over as Yahoo’s sixth permanent CEO, following  Tim Koogle, Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson, all of whom tried to chart a course which improved the iconic but under performing Yahoo’s bottom line.  All failed and were ousted.

On a slightly different cautionary note, women in the higher echelons of tech companies who shake up the culture too much, can get unceremoniously dumped as well.  Remember Carly Fiorina, the HP CEO powerhouse, smiling out from the covers of magazines like Fortune, then banished in a career or at least upward trajectory shattering clash with the HP Board ?

No doubt Marissa Mayer has the right stuff: the experience, knowledge and passion to pull it off, to perhaps invent a new road map for Yahoo which will restore it’s luster.  Onlookers are waiting to hear her strategy and how she will build her team to execute this.

To add to the challenge, Ms. Mayer is several months into a pregnancy and says she will work through her maternity leave.  Which brings us to one topic the media is buzzing about.  CNN notes: “This month’s Atlantic magazine cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” has stoked intense debate on the topic.

Former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter proposes that the only women who manage to reach the pinnacle of their careers while raising a family are “superhuman, rich or self-employed.”

Feminists and policy experts have been saying for years: that corporate culture in the United States, one of few industrialized nations without paid family leave for new parents, does not foster ideal conditions for work-life balance — for women or men.

“We live in a society where there’s very little space for men or women in corporate spheres to easily juggle family lives with professional lives,” said Caroline Heldman, chair of the Politics Department at Occidental College in California…

Someone in Mayer’s position likely has the resources to enable her to work through maternity leave, but that’s certainly not the norm for most working mothers. If anything, her experience is representative of the rules and expectations of CEOs of major corporations, 97% of whom are male, Heldman said.

“Her choices don’t necessarily work for women in lower ranks and should not be held up as a standard for what all men or women should or could do,” Heldman said. “She’s playing by the good old boys’ rules, which uphold a system that doesn’t allow space and time for male or female CEOs to really take time off if they need it.”

But for now, let’s hope Mayer’s ascension is a harbinger of better days and better policies to come for women.  Mayer sounds like a woman who’s up to the challenge.  She also sounds like a woman who knows how to enjoy the journey. According to the online WSJ, Mayer’s “well-known throughout Silicon Valley, in part for her elaborate parties that regularly draw the tech elite. They include a Halloween pumpkin carving bash and an annual winter holiday party where she erects an ice-skating rink in the backyard of her Palo Alto, Calif., home.”

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