In the News

Back to the Future Part II: The Tale of Marissa Mayer

Last week, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo! made news when she announced a new company policy which will prohibit employees from working remotely. Mayer's policy is a disappointment to many working women and feminists who have followed her career with interest and, sometimes, enthusiasm. While Mayer might not consider herself a feminist, her success was undeniably a combined result of her own hard work and that of generations of feminists who labored to make the workplace more hospitable to women and to families. Sadly, it seems, Mayer does not share either their sense of responsibility or their vision. 

Mayer made news when she became the first pregnant woman ever to become CEO of a Fortune-500company. For many working women, Mayer's success seemed to herald a real change. Not so long ago, when I was on the academic job market, I was advised to drop hints about the ages of my children while I dined with my search committee. Because my age made my status as a mother somewhat ambiguous, my advisers counseled  me to assure potential employers that my children were school-aged and that I was no longer in the labor-intensive baby or infant stages. Moreover, while employers are not legally allowed to ask such questions, they would probably be relieved to know that I had neither plans to get pregnant or --worse--take maternity leave. So when Mayer landed the job at Yahoo! many of us breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

Yet, when Mayer had her baby, she took just two weeks' maternity leave. While that is certainly her prerogative, it will certainly create a "chilling effect" with regards to family leave. As CEO, Mayer has the power to determine the company's culture. Making a very public choice about her maternity leave, Mayer has sent a powerful message to her employees about the expectations around work/life balance.  If the CEO chooses to take far less leave time than that to which she is entitled, it seems unlikely that those on the lower rungs will take three, four, or more weeks. This is particularly true for those with ambitions of upward mobility. This became especially galling when we learned that Mayer had a nursery built adjacent to her office, a luxury off limits to all but a very few.

The new policy doesn't just hurt women. It hurts men, too--particularly those men who struggle (like women) to balance their responsibilities to their families with their work obligations. Gladly, the days of fatherly disengagement are receding into the distant past: fathers are increasingly not simply expected to participate in family and home life, but many of them willingly embrace this new role. Policies like this one serve only to make it more difficult for men and women to strike the balance between work and home.

It is true that Mayer has a difficult task in front of her. She is charged with nothing less than bringing Yahoo! back from the brink. Yet, her solutions appear entirely backward--rather than forward--thinking. Mayer had an opportunity--and, I think, a responsibility--to capitalize on the gains of the past forty years, gains that enhanced her career options. Instead, Mayer seems single-mindedly focused on re-creating a model many of us hoped she would help to dismantle. 

 

Back to the Future

Students in my women's history class have been learning about gender and Victorianism for the past several weeks. While they learned all the "norms" of Victorian womanhood, they are also reading about women who broke the rules in either dramatic or subtle ways. We are just now reading about the working-class and immigrant women who populated the dance halls, "nickle dumps" and amusement parks at the turn of the century. They are also exploring the world of Chicago's "Furnished Room Districts." Because middle-class women feared that these would all become sites of sexual expressiveness and experimentation, the inhabitants became subjects of middle-class reforms. 

 

In class we talk about why middle-class women felt they had such a stake in policing the behavior of young immigrant and working-class women and usually conclude that many middle class women felt threatened by the liberated behavior of young women  in the public sphere. To them, it appeared that working-class and immigrant women were violating universal codes of womanhood. That violation seemed to have real--and negative--consequences for all women. The struggle over women's public behavior had everything to do with ideology. What was up for grabs was nothing less than the definition of womanhood. Middle-class reformers were at least as concerned with maintaining their own status as with "helping" these young "women adrift." Students agree--thankfully--that these kinds of debates reside firmly in the past. While I do my best to suggest otherwise, sometimes I fight a losing battle.

 

And yet, last week a friend reminded me how current these conversations truly are. In my tiny town (which became famous for its one-time ban on ice cream cones and high heels), a controversy erupted over a promotional event which featured a lingere fashion show. The event was made the subject of a city council meeting at which residents were called upon to give their input. One resident insisted that risque event threatened to "change the character" of the sleepy village.  In the course of her comments, she called the event's models "sluts" and "whores. The town's newspaper grew the controversy by not only reprinting her comments, but publishing the photograph the resident had provided. Just above the picture, the word "SLUTS" appeared in bold text. 

 

While the city ultimately declined to take action, the controversy reveals that controversy over women's public behavior is still alive and well.