Has There Even Been a Baby More Important Than Marissa Mayer's Baby?

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Hey females (and maybe males?) there's a female CEO who had a baby. New York has a feature story, "Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?" about what the event means for females, CEOs, and babies everywhere. Lisa Miller argues that Mayer is a "a living, breathing rebuttal" to The Atlantic article by Ann Marie Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," because look at her having it all as CEO with a baby in tow. 

Since her appointment as CEO of Yahoo, Mayer's baby has gotten as much, if not more, press attention that she and her company. Take the day her new position was announced: "When Yahoo announced Mayer’s appointment on July 16, the Internet was cautiously pleased. But when, in a carefully orchestrated maneuver later that same night, Mayer tweeted that she was expecting, interest in her blew up," Miller explains. It's true. For every article about Mayer's new gig, there were many others debating what her future baby meant. And now that she has had the child, we have gotten even more deep conversations about the baby, including this one from New York. This does not seem to be a rebuttal to Slaughter as much as a confirmation that there is a deep and wide interest in how women who are highly successful professionals go about raising children. 

But, to get back to the original question: Can Mayer have it all? That's not really for us to answer. But here's where Miller seems to come down on the question:

This newest version of Marissa, the mom-geek-CEO, will surely test Mayer’s iterative powers, for she’s playing to a tougher crowd, one that won’t be placated by tweets, Manolos, and rapturous praise for pineapple malts. Scrutinizing her every move is the rest of Yahoo’s activist board, eleven (mostly) men who will surely fire her if she can’t bring up the price of the company’s stock holdings. And back at home there’s Baby Boy Bogue, who doesn’t care about anything except when he next gets fed.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.