I admit it. I'm a white male. (I do have 4 half-Chinese half-siblings, but they are irrelevant.) However I'm married, and the father of two children.
The first reaction that I had when I saw that she was pregnant was, "She has no idea what she's getting into." I've been there, twice, and seen first hand what pregnancy and hormones take out of a woman who has a baby. I've experienced what it is like to go through the first few months. Sure, she has help. But I know how strong the desire is to connect. And as soon as she does, I know what amount of energy is required. And if she fails to devote enough energy, I know what the pain of being rejected by your own child is like.
This applies to some extent to both parents. I personally took much more than her planned 2 weeks for each birth, and am aware that my performance at work was directly affected for months. (My ability to work hard has been impacted for years but that is a more complicated story.)
However all of this applies to women more than men for the solid biological reason that women are the ones actually get pregnant, go through child birth, have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk. (Yes, you can give the baby formula, but if you've read the research there is a significant chance that feeding your baby formula will reduce IQ. Do you want to risk that for your child?? However breast feeding is a significant time commitment, and opens you up for even more hormones.) And this is if everything goes well. It often doesn't. For instance about 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression, and being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind that. Or you can wind up on bed rest if the pregnancy is difficult - and the odds of a difficult pregnancy go up rapidly when the mother has external stresses.
Yes, it is PC to claim some sort of absolute equivalence between men and women. But this is very clearly false when it comes to child birth.
When I saw her saying that she'd only take 2 weeks of maternity leave, the first thing that I said was, "She has absolutely no clue what she's in for." When I told my wife the story and my opinion, her only question was, "First time mother?" I said, "Yes," then my wife laughed in agreement.
Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you have? Have you considered the possibility that parenting might just be harder than you think, and people who have been down that path might just know something that you don't know?
I'll counter your anecdote with my anecdote: My wife could have done it, I would wager.
Advice to Marissa Meyer:
- the baby and the nanny should be with you 24/7. I don't care who you're meeting with, you should be holding or wearing the baby.
- if the baby fusses, don't hand her off to the nanny -- start nursing her or change her yourself, no matter who you're with. You can still carry on a conversation with them, and you're powerful enough they have to pretend they're not offended -- they shouldn't be, anyways.
- invest in a standing desk and a sling. Babies love to sleep in those things, and are usually quiet even when awake. They'll be much more comfortable if you're standing rather than sitting, and it gives you the ability to rock them while working.
- have walking meetings. Great for you, the baby and the participants.
- it's your partner's (or an employee's) job to make sure that you get a proper sleep at night. The shorter the interruption at night, the easier it is to get back to sleep, and the less the interruption. Your only job is to nurse. It's your partner's job to pick up the baby when it cries, to soothe her and to change her.
If the baby is colicky, all bets are off. But most babies aren't.
And this advice is only for the first 6 months or so. By then the baby is much more awake & aware, and is probably better off in a nursery right next door. Working at 6 months is fairly well travelled ground.
Very few women have the luxury of stopping all work when their baby arrives. Heck, most of them don't even get 2 weeks off. I'm willing to bet that running Yahoo and raising a single child is easier than cooking all the meals, doing all the cleaning and looking after 1 or 2 preschool children as well as a baby, if only because Marissa will have nannies, housekeepers and secretaries.
Ah yes, once you're a parent, everyone will tell you how to raise your kid, and they will all be very sure of themselves. They will all disagree with each other. You have to get used to it.
In particular it sounds like you're an adherent of Dr. Sears. There may be benefits to his techniques. But the whole goal is to have the woman paying constant attention to the baby - which means that the woman never can pay undivided attention to anything else. This does not seem to me to be compatible with running a company, even in the best of times. (Which Yahoo is not in.)
(A random snide remark about Dr Sears. A man with 8 children advocates a child rearing technique where all of the work is done by the mom. Coincidence?)
What I was really thinking was how awesome it would be if Marissa did bring her baby to work every day for the first 6 months or so. That would really be noticeable and would hopefully do a lot to remove some of the bias against women of childbearing age as well as encourage other companies to allow this sort of practice.
As an aside, I was the one that did most of the baby-wearing. My wife has short arms and large breasts, so she was unable to do much with her arms while wearing. My daughters spent a large amount of time in a sling while I was standing up at the computer.
One further observation: the original poster never said she alone could choose to spend more time with her child, yet many people are leaping to this conclusion. Both her and her husband are incredibly successful and both of them could spend all day at home; OP did not exclude this possibility. Perhaps her husband will stay at home. But she clearly will choose not to spend much time at home (at least not initially).
Ultimately the original poster is objectively correct in stating that anybody who, in a position of absolute and complete financial independence, chooses not to spend more time with their children makes a very public statement about their priorities. You only have a fixed amount of time in life, and a fixed amount of time to spend with your children. It simply is not possible to be CEO of Yahoo without compromising on the time you spend with your children.
Whether or not it will have a measurable effect on the development of her relationship with her children, or their future personalities, is a matter for personal opinion.
We _are_ all Rousseauists now, aren't we? There have been cultures in which the women of the ruling class handed off their offspring to nannies and for that matter wet nurses very early on.
(Upper 50s, one child now in 20s. Yes, it's a lot of work.)
My wife (also a tech exec) could've done this too (though she'd taken 4 weeks off, with an experienced full time nanny). Some women are just super organized. And yes, some women are less sensitive/susceptible to hormonal fluctuations. We have 3 children. Each has quite different personalities, all of them fairly attached to their mom. If you got lucky, things are pretty smooth :) You can solve the breast feeding problem by smart combination of pumping and feeding. All my kids were on breast milk longer (> 1y) than average (drop to 43% at 6m). I got to spend more time (still less than her) with my kids too, changing diapers and picking up/dropping off to/fro school etc.
Based on what I've seen how Marissa operates (organized and data driven), I'd say she'll have no problem (on her side) to handle her first pregnancy and child.
I highly respect the views of the parent poster (btilly). As a father of two, I fully can relate to your posting, including an almost identical conversation with my lovely wife.
The parent's point was not that these concerns are invalid but rather that HNers are severely biased since they only apply them to women. To counter, you proceeded to repeat the same concerns in the same bigoted manner.
I've been there.
I am a working, breastfeeding mother and I strongly disagree with your post. Does my opinion trump yours since I am higher on the been-there scale than you?
About 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression.
Up to 25% of both men and women suffer from post-partum depression. Wikipedia it.
Being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind [postpartum depression].
Numerous studies show that working mothers are less depressed than stay-at-home mothers.
Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you have?
The Yahoo board, who made their decision with full knowledge of Mayer's pregnancy, are collectively (and often individually) older than you, with more children.
Solid biological reason that women get pregnant, go through child birth, have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk.
Please, enough with science and biology as a means to justify frankly bigoted opinions. The same biology gives most new mothers a noticeable increase in energy that makes it possible to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule to accommodate constant nursing and other demands of motherhood. The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc.
Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably ill-suited you as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?
Edit: FWIW, I know you are an intelligent guy, based on your HN and SO contributions. If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is very personal to female HN readers like me - and the fact that you are clearly intelligent only makes it worse. I'd like to think that it's possible for me to nudge your opinion in a more equitable direction. If nothing else, please consider that dismissing a set of beliefs as worthless PC garbage is most often a euphemism for "other people's problems". I'd like to think that most male hackers don't think of female hackers in "us vs. them" terms implied by the above, despite the apparent misogynist demographic on HN. Peace :)
I didn't get the impression that the parent post was stating that a women has to choose between motherhood and work.
If I had to paraphrase the post, it would be "I don't think she realizes how hard it's going to be." Which is true, simply because NO PARENT, male or female, can truly internalize how hard parenting is until they're a parent. I was warned plenty of times and I still wasn't prepared--not by a long shot.
However, I can understand why people get defensive over this issue. When I took six months off to take care of my daughter (while my wife worked) I came to realize that:
a) You can get pretty self-conscious at times, especially when you see examples of people parenting better than you are.
b) Parenting can take up an INFINITE amount of your time and energy, if you let it. Children evolved to maximize their chance of thriving, and that pretty much means they will demand as much as you can give, and more, and then even more. It's just how children are. But that means that there's always some good bit of parenting that you potentially could do, but can't: either because there's no money, or because you're too tired, or because you have to work. So, in essence, mothers do choose between parenting and work, but they also choose between parenting and sleeping, and parenting and eating, and parenting and reading, and parenting and socializing. Heck, many times I had to choose between parenting and showering. However, while I felt guilty about my shower, I think that in the long term the kids will turn out OK. <g>
What is my point? It is no more or less than that childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll out of women. What toll it will take out of any particular woman is difficult to predict. In most cases the toll is far larger than the people involved expected. Any woman coming into motherhood, particularly for the first time, is naive if they think that they can plan to put motherhood in a box and be confident that it will actually stay there.
This is different for men. If a man with sufficient resources decides that he does not want his work to be impacted by fatherhood, it won't be. Whatever the cost to his family or the opinion of his friends, he really can ignore parenting and continue to work normally. I would not personally choose that, and men who choose to be involved with their children open themselves up for some of the same issues that women go through. But I am confident a high powered male executive who promises that has very low risk of failing to deliver on that promise.
You dismiss this by calling it bigotry. I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and biology. I think that having even a casual acquaintance with the facts, or having some personal acquaintances with some horror stories, puts me on solid ground to say what I did. (For example I know one woman who had problems with water retention that caused severe carpal tunnel. She was unable to pick anything up, drive, use a mouse or keyboard, etc for months. Good luck with that!) Calling me a bigot invokes a taboo, I'm a horrible person for thinking those thoughts, but it says nothing one way or the other on whether I am right.
All of that said, Marissa is a truly impressive woman. She brings a lot to the table here. There is a reason why she has triggered more discussion than anyone else in the previous parade of CEOs that Yahoo has had recently. Her pregnancy is an obvious risk factor for her, and it is silly to try to claim otherwise. But that is a risk, not a guarantee. Most women do not have particularly difficult pregnancies. Many women are able to balance babies and work. But you can't plan on this in any particular case. And she is likely to get a surprise about how much work it is.
Now let's turn to your attempts to personally attack me.
The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc.
It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything in her life. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU (one of the top medical schools in the country) earned with honors. Can you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship? If your answer is no, then you're in the same boat that I am. I have great respect for my wife.
My wife's opinions do not come from an inability to work hard. They come from her knowledge and experience of what motherhood can take out of women.
Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably ill-suited you as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?
Thank you for calling me young, at almost 43 I have not thought of myself that way for years. I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine.
As for my children, my wife is right now going through a medical residency. I therefore am a full-time parent who does part time contracting on the side. Sure, I spend time on NH and used to on SO, but you may rest assured that my children are not be compromised by that. (If you go back I said that having children has limited my ability to work hard, now you know why.)
(If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is very personal to female HN readers like me.)
Please stop projecting opinions on me that I do not have. Talk to what I am saying, and not the straw man argument that you think I said.
As my personal life makes clear, I not only do not believe that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work, but I am personally making serious professional sacrifices right now to allow my wife to achieve what she wants to achieve.
If this surprises you, then I highly recommend that you go back and read what I wrote to try to figure out what I actually think. Because what I'm saying really isn't that unreasonable.
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Update
I wrote that before your edit. Thanks for the kind words. I suspect that my opinions may be more equitable than you thought, but the opinions that you don't like are unlikely to change. They are not what I want the world to be, but are observations of how it actually seems to work.
On postpartum depression, I was looking for a condition that hits lots of women, and it was the first that popped into my mind, and the first link I found for it said 10%. Now that I look at it in more detail I find that there is disagreement on what it is and when people have it, on the frequency, and a lack of clarity on the causes. Indeed there likely are many factors that contribute. Many of the causes you'll find in the literature are tied to hormones and biology. Many are not. That was a bad example.
A better example would be Caesarian section. Caesarian sections are very common, and the usual recovery time for women is 4-6 weeks. Which is significantly longer than the 2 weeks that Marissa is planning on. Obviously being a CEO is not a physically demanding job, if need be she could do it from a wheelchair. But recovering from major surgery is likely to hamper her performance.
Childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll...
Sigh. You can continue to talk about birth|breastfeeding|hormones|etc as if my and parent's point was that those factors don't exist. Of course they do. The point is - please reread the parent and the grandparent - they exist equally for both men and women.
This is different for men.
If ever bigotry expressed itself more clearly.
I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and biology.
I addressed, and refuted, your facts, point by point. You responded with is, "I claim solid grounds based on statistics and biology", only to continue with an anecdote about some woman you know having carpal tunnel related to water retention. Uh, ok.
It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything in her life.
I neither said, nor implied, anything of the sort. Please reread my post.
My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU. Can you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship?
Congrats on your wife having a PhD from Dartmouth. Not going to participate in your ridiculous fantasy where I am a defendant and you the supreme judge on whether I measure up to your wife. My proverbial dick is big enough, thank you.
I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine.
Thanks for making my point for me. You said pregnant women/mothers live in a hormonal fog that makes them unsuitable for success in business. I turned it around and made up an example of how same bigotry could be applied to men. Now you know how it feels when the other half speculates on how your brain chemistry impacts your abilities, all based on cheap stereotypes. Feels shitty, doesn't it?
I see little point in continuing this discussion. I can respond point by point, but to what purpose? You will continue to ignore and discount what I say while accusing me over and over of being a bigot.
In your world, birth, breastfeeding and hormones exist equally for men and women. There is a basic equivalence.
In my world, childbirth is a very intense and somewhat risky experience that women have no choice about going through after they become pregnant and choose not to abort. Breastfeeding is significant experience that women may choose to go through as well.
In my world, men have a choice about whether and to what extent they we choose to be involved in parenting. Men who choose to parent will experience hormones, etc that may catch us by surprise. But we can choose not to parent, and if we do we will have no hormonal impact.
In my world, an intense and risky experience that you are committed to going through is in no way equal to being able to choose doing nothing. In my world acknowledging that something intense and risky is actually intense and risky is not bigotry. Bigotry would be categorically choosing to not give someone an opportunity for fear of the risk. But acknowledging that it is real is called honesty.
Now if you want to actually learn more about the important hormones and their effects, I suggest that you start with the big one, oxytocin.
You may have the pleasure of the final response. Unless you say something truly shocking, I won't be bothering to respond to you any more. We've both said enough that people should be able to decide what they do and do not agree with.
What I meant was, "...irrelevant whether I get privilege from being a white male." Not irrelevant as people or to society. Indeed two of my sisters are insanely successful, though in areas of life that have nothing to do with software development.
The first reaction that I had when I saw that she was pregnant was, "She has no idea what she's getting into." I've been there, twice, and seen first hand what pregnancy and hormones take out of a woman who has a baby. I've experienced what it is like to go through the first few months. Sure, she has help. But I know how strong the desire is to connect. And as soon as she does, I know what amount of energy is required. And if she fails to devote enough energy, I know what the pain of being rejected by your own child is like.
This applies to some extent to both parents. I personally took much more than her planned 2 weeks for each birth, and am aware that my performance at work was directly affected for months. (My ability to work hard has been impacted for years but that is a more complicated story.)
However all of this applies to women more than men for the solid biological reason that women are the ones actually get pregnant, go through child birth, have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk. (Yes, you can give the baby formula, but if you've read the research there is a significant chance that feeding your baby formula will reduce IQ. Do you want to risk that for your child?? However breast feeding is a significant time commitment, and opens you up for even more hormones.) And this is if everything goes well. It often doesn't. For instance about 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression, and being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind that. Or you can wind up on bed rest if the pregnancy is difficult - and the odds of a difficult pregnancy go up rapidly when the mother has external stresses.
Yes, it is PC to claim some sort of absolute equivalence between men and women. But this is very clearly false when it comes to child birth.
When I saw her saying that she'd only take 2 weeks of maternity leave, the first thing that I said was, "She has absolutely no clue what she's in for." When I told my wife the story and my opinion, her only question was, "First time mother?" I said, "Yes," then my wife laughed in agreement.
Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you have? Have you considered the possibility that parenting might just be harder than you think, and people who have been down that path might just know something that you don't know?