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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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