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@mrbee: I completely agree with what you wrote!

Interesting! It is killing me to take off 6 weeks for maternity, and I am going to try and swing 8 if I can. I really can't imagine taking less though!!

I saw yesterday on People.com this related article : "Should Marissa Mayer Take a Shortened, Working Maternity Leave?"

http://celebritybabies.people.com/2012/07/17/marissa-mayer-google-yahoo-baby-boy-due-october-poll/

My first thought was: "THIS is news???"
My second thought was: "Who cares???"

IMO, It's no one's business except, her, her husband, and (to a lesser extent) her company.

I feel very fortunate to live in Canada where we get 1 year maternity leave, IF we choose to take it. I will probably take the full year, but my mother was back to work within 3 weeks for all of us - as a self-employed business owner, she didn't want to be away that long. HER choice!

@highwire: Ditto. She's a grown adult; I'm sure she can figure out for herself how much time is appropriate to take off post-partum.

Experience is the best teacher, No one can really understand how a woman feels postpartum until you have been through it. So its a bit harsh to expect her to know everything ahead of time. I dont think its a big deal if she says she doesnt want to take time off, good for her. I wish women like her in high positions would take more time off and would fight for more time off for the rest of us but its not my call

I think this sets a horrible precedent. She sounds like a workaholic and I have spent my entire working life working for people like that- it's a nightmare. I read the "Can Women Have it All?" article in the Atlantic a few weeks ago and the whole point of it was that no, women can’t have it all the way that the American workforce is today. We need women in executive positions to start acting like being a parent is just as important as being a good employee. If they hired her knowing she was pregnant, she had the ability to say "I'll be taking my full 6/8 weeks like I'm entitled to" and she didn’t. She basically said “As soon as I pop that kid out I’ll be checking my Blackberry” like someone’s life depends on her answering an email. Maternity leave is not a vacation- the purpose of it is to allow yourself to physically recover from giving birth and spend time bonding with your child. I think it's sad she's acting like any job is more important than your health and your child.

I guess my biggest issue with this is that no male CEO ever has been called out for going back to work within weeks of the birth of his child. Now, granted, men don't usually have a physical recovery following birth, but from my own experience, not all women even need two weeks to recover from birth. I was out bowling 5 days after having my son, and I felt great! If women can physically recover within that time period, why is that that males and females are held to different standards as to what is acceptable in negotiating working and parenthood?

Really what this shows me is that, despite our attitudes that men and women should be equal in all things, there still a bias that women are expected to take on the majority of the child rearing. Every day men go back to work within weeks (or days or even hours!) of their children being born, and it's not an issue, on either the micro or macro scale. However, a women chooses to take a short leave, and people get all up in arms that she's somehow overerestimating (typo, oops!) herself and injuring the population at large by not taking a full leave.

In my ideal world, both men and women would be allowed to take as much time as they need/want to adjust to parenthood. However, if we're ever going to get to that ideal, we need to change our views on equality in parenthood and start allowing men the same opportunities, and holding them to the same standards, as women.

I don't think this is anyone else's business. This is between her, her husband and their child.

@dookie32: The thing is, this is not just ANY job, but likely her dream job. She also never said that it's more important than her health and her child. This is the first ever in history, that a female is hired as CEO for a fortune 500 company. I find Marissa's passion for creating the best user experience at Google, and now Yahoo, really inspirational. It's her decision, and nobody else's, to decide what she should do. I'm not a workaholic, but I can appreciate one's drive and love for their job!

Marissa is super hardcore; she regularly works 90 hour weeks. When Google was starting, she says she worked 130 hour weeks:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48213365

<< Many entrepreneurs don't even think twice when it comes to working around the clock. Marissa Mayer, Google's 20th employee and current vice president of location and local services, is no exception. When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk.

"For my first five years at Google, I pulled an all-nighter every week," Mayer said in a recent talk at New York's 92Y cultural center. "It was a lot of hard work." >>

Someone that would never take a long maternity leave!

I agree with @Honeybee. If a man was appointed CEO, and his wife was pregnant and having the kid soon after his job began, would this even be an issue? I think she should choose what's right for her and her family and her career, and everyone else should do the same.

Amen, MrsBells.

@Mrsbells: The only difference between the leave a birthing parent takes post-partum and the leave a non-birthing parent takes post-partum is that birthing parents have to go through a physical recovery. And if the issue here is of a medical, physical recovery, how much leave Marissa Mayer does or does not take has absolutely no bearing on how much leave someone else takes. As soon as she is physically healed and cleared by a doctor to return to her job (which, let's be honest, is an office job and probably not that physically demanding), she can and it would have no effect whatsoever on what would be expected from other women (since they would, presumably, also have to be physically cleared by their doctors for their specific type of work). People heal at different rates, so even if there is a "standard" healing time, some people may be recovered sooner and some people may need more time; one person healing faster and returning to work sooner has nothing to do with the another person's healing/recovery time.

But maternity leave is not mainly for physical recovery, and that's where people are getting upset. From the articles linked above, commentators are insinuating that either a)she won't be emotionally/mentally ready to return to work in a few weeks or b)that her short leave will set up an expectation that all women should be fully prepared to return to work a few weeks post-partum. Except that men (who are facing most of the same issues of adjusting to parenthood, bonding with baby, and caring for a demanding newborn) already take little or no time off and it's not even questioned. If two people of opposite genders are taking the same amount of leave for the same reasons, and only one person is criticized for that choice, it brings to light the true inequality and sexism of the situation. Mothers are expected to take more time off, not for physical recovery, but because of expectations of childrearing duties. Marissa Mayer is doing exactly what male CEOs before her have done time and time again; only she is being criticized for it, and that's the difference.

Just wanted to point out that since she won't be at Yahoo for at least a year before the baby, she wouldn't qualify for FMLA anyway and her job wouldn't be legally protected.

Of course, if she wanted to take more time off Yahoo could work with her IF they chose to, but they aren't obligated to. I assume she understood that when she took the new job and it wasn't an issue for her.

I don't really care what she does with her life, as long as she doesn't come out publicly saying that all women should follow her example (which I doubt she will do).

It is nobody's business how long she wants to take off and she is an insane workaholic so she'll work it out but I agree that it sends the message that women in America don't need to take a decent amount of time for maternity leave. It's the whole "having it all" thing or "if she can do it, why can't you all?". I don't expect her to join the fight for longer maternity leaves but I guess it would be nice if she did!

I personally (especially having had 2 kids), would not be able to go back to work so soon but it's between her and her family what she chooses to do. As long as she's not enforcing her standards onto her staff or advocating that all women should take shortened maternity leaves, then it really is none of our business.

@looch: I agree with you completely!!