I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.

> She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had.

Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job".

> Then she promptly built a nursery in her office.

She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.

Both fair points.

Also remember that by the time she killed the WFH policy, Yahoo had been circling the drain for a long time. When your best folks can easily find new/better jobs, they do; and you're left with a company full of people who are having a hard time finding anything else. It's one thing to kill a successful WFH policy at a thriving company; it's another entirely to do it with a company that is having problems.

>Google does not have a WFH policy.

Google is also among the companies I wouldn't want to work for. It's just a deal breaker for me. Having a policy and then rescinding it would be another deal breaker. I get that there were slackers, but when it comes to developers, were team leads really not seeing this? They had to have an audit? How does this type of slacking even work? "Oh, I'm working on this thing that should have taken a few hours for the third day in a row".

My point was that I don't think she afforded the "bring your infant to work" policy for developers. One main reason I might choose to work from home, is that I would be able to look after an infant while my significant other ran errands. All kudos to heading right back to work especially after that tough of a procedure. (although I'd argue SHE should have worked from home at that point)...

Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding.

Mayer was a bad CEO – take Alibaba out of the equation and Yahoo became materially worse off expressly because of the decisions she made. Look at the ridiculous acquisitions, look at the brain drain. What the hell is Yahoo’s product? Email? They can’t even keep that secure – compromising a BILLION accounts. They were warned about MD5 in 2008. Yahoo’s Security team was treated like second class citizens – requests being denied because of cost too much or they were considered a low priority. Who set those priorities? Mayer. A a billion accounts got compromised as a result. There is a direct cause-effect.

Complaining about her salary is completely valid – not because it was “high” but because she got such an incomprehensible salary for running the company into the ground. Nobody complains about Tim Cook’s salary because nobody cares – Apple is extremely profitable, which is the entire point of a CEO. Tim Cook is a liberal gay man – so if the idea that people are harder on Mayer is because of her sex – imagine how hard they should ostensibly be on Cook. Yet Cook is actually doing a good job. Nobody cares what someone has between their legs if the share price is good.

Mayer is criticized because she was horrible, ineffective and engaged in substance-poor grandstanding and she got paid enormously for essentially crashing the ship into an iceberg before Verizon came along like the Carpathia. Sure, Yahoo was the Titanic before Mayer arrived, but she knew that and yet still went full-ahead sailing Yahoo into the ice field or irrelevancy.

Thank you for laying it out so well. I am a female executive and I am so sick of everyone saying that she's only getting criticized because she's female. So what, we can't get criticized if we do a horrible job? If we treat our employees unfairly? If we don't do what's best for our companies? She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired long ago.

> She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired log ago.

On what basis are you claiming that? Do you have any idea about how the other CEOs before her did?

Disclaimer: I worked at Yahoo for several CEOs, including Mayer. I think she was the best CEO at Yahoo in a long time. So please, enlighten me why my impression of her is incorrect.

She was a bad CEO by the measure of ALL CEOS, not just Yahoo:

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/top-10-management-mistake...

https://qz.com/314225/everything-we-learned-from-marissa-may...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2015/11/20/marissa-ma...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/262704/why-wont-anyone-tal...

http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...

https://www.thestreet.com/story/13332877/1/yahoo-ceo-mayer-i...

http://variety.com/2016/digital/features/marissa-mayer-yahoo...

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2015/12/30/worst-ceos-20...

http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-worst-ceos-in-corporate-...

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272469

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh...

Do you want more?

These are all outsiders second-guessing and, in many cases, just making shit up.

I was there. I saw the sea change she brought into the company. Morale skyrocketed, after the company was just drifting around for years. Compared to Carol Bartz, she was a CEO extraordinaire.

Outsiders are often able to see much more clearly what's really going on with a dying organization.

Well, we should just listen to outsiders then, right? Who cares about what's happening internally when the outsiders see it all?

I remember reading Eric Jackson's screeds and he was clueless as hell.

I'm thinking I'm going to listen to the many, many outside experts, plus what I see myself reported by other insiders, vs. one anonymous insider I run across on a site who worked for her and appears to have bias.

That is your prerogative, and I wish you all the luck. I didn't work for her, I was 3 levels below her and experienced the sea-change when she came. After suffering through the likes of Semel, she was a huge, positive change.

> Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding.

All B2B industrials; not consumer tech companies that get reported on ad nauseam in the media. Lockheed's product lifecycles are measured in decades; Yahoo's in months. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

Agree that Yahoo had really shitty product focus, but that was true 10 years before she joined. Like you said, Yahoo had been warned about MD5 nearly a decade ago -- security had obviously been deprioritized for years before she arrived.

What did she do? She stopped the bleeding long enough to get a sale done. She basically acted like a private equity CEO. If you view her job as extracting the most value out of Yahoo, she did a pretty good job of that.

you can also include Lisa Su, CEO of AMD and Mary Barra, CEO of GM (also the highest paid CEO in the car industry)

Without a doubt, there are a ton of extremely capable female executives who are rightfully recognized for their contributions.

The criticism against Mayer was due to a combination of her age, gender and "celebrity" status (celebrities tend to be attractive, successful and wealthy). A man would not have had a media circus around him due to the fact that he chose to start a family while being a CEO (a choice that she informed the Yahoo board of before taking the job). Mayer also looks about 10 years younger than she is in most photos; which IMO leads to a lot of armchair executives criticizing her as inexperienced (lol, she was a key member of the team that built the product that destroyed Yahoo, so I'm pretty sure she's experienced).

IMO Mayer is a great example that having kids doesn't have to derail your career as a female executive. While she may set an unrealistic standard for other women (damn Stanford overachievers!) I can't fault her for figuring out a way to make the various elements of her life work for her.

What I am really looking forward to is to hear how Marissa Mayer will frame her time at Yahoo in hindsight.

Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.

Tim Cook isn't even the highest paid exec at Apple. It's Angela Ahrendts, she formerly lead a successful turnaround at Burberry as CEO.

How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments?

Mary Barra made $22.6 million, more than all the male auto CEOs. I haven't really ever seen much bashing of her personally.

Elizabeth Holmes was a media love story until it all came crashing down, although she was a founder/CEO.

Agree about the cesspools though.

Lisa Su of AMD is another female CEO I can think of. I don't think I've seen anyone bash her. I mean she is extraordinarily competent and has 3 degrees in EE to boot.

Jessica Alba to add another. It's so easy to not be taken seriously but her Honest company is now valued at $1 billion.

the "has agreed to pay out $1.55 million in a class action lawsuit settlement for lying to customers about a chemical they claimed was absent from their products" Honest company?

Here's a list of about 30 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies. Most are not generally familiar names.

http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500

Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard is another female CEO (and before her, Carly Fiorina). Both have certainly come in for their share of criticism. So would I, if I had to be responsible for HP.

>> How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments?

Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO

Ginny Rometty takes heat pretty regularly, but is basically successful.

Or it's the opposite and HN desperately wants female CEOs to succeed.