Category Archives: role models
New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer – Breaking into the Top Echelon of the Male Geeks World. Will She Succeed?
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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Hillary Clinton’s Continuing Rise, Increasing Clout & Charisma
At the Pinnacle of Hillary Clinton’s Career
By Rachael Combe | April 05, 2012
Secretary Clinton’s…. Hillary’s career, management capabilities and esteem in the public keep rising. As this author, Rachel Combe, in Elle Magazine points 
out: “These days Hillary Clinton seems to get standing ovations whenever she opens her mouth.” And “her favorability rating is hovering at about 60 percent …while her negatives have dropped to roughly 30 percent, making her …. according to Gallup, the most admired woman in America ….”
As we are all aware, Clinton is a global advocate for women and children. She makes the case that “Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world,” she says. “It is past time for women to take their rightful place, side by side with men, in the rooms where the fates of peoples, where their children’s and grandchildren’s fates, are decided.” She has also come to reflect a lot of complicated feelings, some negative, that many in our country have about women and power. But over time, her earnestness and good works seem to have allayed the misgivings of those who felt particularly uncomfortable about women, and Clinton in particular, in power.
Clinton is using her power deftly, winning over world leaders and seeding the State Department with global, life- changing women’s initiatives. She also “started the Women in Public Service Project, a cooperative venture between the Seven Sisters colleges and the State Department to encourage more women to go into public service, with the goal of achieving parity in 2050, accelerating our current pace by about 460 years. The kickoff event was inspiring, with speakers such as Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and Atifete Jahjaga, the 37-year-old female president of Kosovo.”
In many ways Clinton is managing to transform our world for the better. And, along the way, she appears to be transforming herself, or letting her real self emerge and evolve, into one the most likeable and charismatic leaders on the world stage. Who knows where she might go from here?
For more, go to At the Pinnacle of Hillary Clinton’s Career
Women making slow gains in boardroom
Women making slow gains in boardroom – Mar. 7, 2012. 
“In 2011, for the first time in history, women held more than one in ten board seats globally. This interactive shows how power divides up between men and women in the world’s boardrooms,”
Related articles
- Power in the boardroom: Women vs. men (edition.cnn.com)
- Roger Carr: Four ways to get more women in boardrooms and make British business better (telegraph.co.uk)
- Cameron to set targets for women in boardrooms (marieclaire.co.uk)
Men Run the World – Close the achievement gap by closing the ambition gap
Image by jdlasica via Flickr
via Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg at Barnard: “Men run the world” – May. 18, 2011
“What if men ran half of households around the world and women ran half the companies? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg thinks the world would be a better place.
Sandberg offered that idea in her commencement speech on Tuesday in New York to a group of 600 graduating students from all-women college Barnard, as well as their camera-festooned families.”
Her message: “There aren’t enough women in the workforce, and the gender gap is very much part of our society.”
“Men run the world,” she told the audience, before rolling out a list of statistics to support the statement. One eye-popping one: Among the world’s 190 major heads of states, nine are women. Those numbers haven’t moved in the past decade.”
Sandberg is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Chief Operating Officer, lending her experience and operational expertise, having served as chief of staff for the Treasury Department and her extensive contacts with advertisers from her time as a top executive at Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Many investors and venture capitalists require experienced management, sometimes known as “adult supervision” for their young techie geniuses before they part with their money. Sandburg is sometimes referred to as filling this role for 27 year old Mark Zuckerberg.
She urged women to be more aggressive in seeking to climb the corporate or government ladder: “Women underestimate their performance.”
The only antidote to the hurdles that may be thrown in your path is to work hard, aim high and do your job well. And, of course, Sheryl Sandberg is an inspiration to women seeking to climb the ladder as she is the operational power behind what is described at “the tech world’s hottest company.”
Related articles
- Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s Number 2, On Keeping The Company … (huffingtonpost.com)
- Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg [Voices] (voices.allthingsd.com)
- Zuckerberg And Sandberg “Fundamentally Disagree” Over Whether Facebook Should Go To China (businessinsider.com)
