Marissa Mayer (Photo : Wikipedia)
New York University Professor Scott Galloway is on the receiving end of women's group wrath over his statement in a weekend TV interview with Bloomberg that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is keeping her job only because she is pregnant with twins.
Verily Magazine accused the professor of sexism. It said the statement is misplaced "not just from a social standpoint but from a business standpoint as well."
The magazine insisted that 37-year-old Mayer, who is due to give birth in December, "has done a faily decent job running Yahoo. It cited doubling of the company's shareprice since she became CEO in 2012, fixed thousands of problems in Yahoo and increased number of job applicants to almost 12,000 per week from 2,000.
It admits that Yahoo's future could be uncertain, but stressed that the CEO - who received $42 million compensation in 2014 - is steering the firm in the right path. However, Verily also notes 2015 is a bad year for Yahoo with stocks down 37 percent from January and 18 percent the past month.
Although the Wall Street Journal points out that CEO firing is the lowest in more than 10 years, Verily adds that the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is 4.6 years, while Yahoo CEOs even have shorter tenures which could also mean Mayer's term may soon be near.
In Twitter, the Bloomberg article was reposted several times and a number of members also sided with Mayer.
HR Grapevine pointed out that Galloway is male, while Daniel Roberts finds the professor's opinion silly and offensive. Regina Huber said the statement resurrects the maternity leave wars.
Meanwhile, Marketwatch points out that Mayer is not the only female in the U.S. who is taking minimal parental leave. Data from Pew Research Center said that by the late 2000s, only 20 percent of women stopped working after birth, while 80 percent resumed their work one month after child birth. In the 1960s, only 35 percent returned to their jobs, while 65 percent quit their jobs after giving birth.
