Who Has It Easier, a Pregnant CEO or a Pregnant Maid?
LatestWhen newly-coronated Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that she and her husband were expecting their first baby in October, people who are not Marissa Mayer or Marissa Mayer’s doctor immediately began speculating that having a baby would be a detriment to her ability to do her job. Some even went so far as to suggest that Mayer should take some time off from CEO-ing to focus on the baby, and other suggested that the nature of the American workplace needs to change in order to allow more women like Mayer to fulfill leadership roles. But are we focusing our concern about “having it all” on the wrong end of the economic spectrum? What about women in the shadows, working outside of 9 to 5, with no college degree, struggling to earn minimum wage? Spoiler alert: they get hosed.
Julie Smolyansky, the CEO of Lifeway Foods, has given birth twice since she took over her publicly traded company at age 27. Like most executives, she describes herself as a “highly motivated,” “Type A” sort of person, and she said she has no doubt that the traits that she and other CEO’s share means that Marissa Mayer will be able to pull mother/CEO double duty easily. “CEO’s multitask all the time. It’s just a different type of multitasking,” she explained. Smolyansky certainly benefitted from living during an era when the face of the executive suite is changing; thanks to technological advances that were unavailable even 10 years ago, she was able to stay in touch with her employees and business partners via her Blackberry until she was literally in the delivery room. And after she gave birth to her first daughter in 2008, she was able to work from home for two weeks before returning to the office, and because she’s the boss and because newborns “pretty much sleep all the time,” Smolyansky was able to bring her daughter with her to work after her return. She set up a crib, took her infant daughter with her to meetings, and carried on running the company with her tiny offspring in tow. The entire time, she remained an effective executive; in 2008, during the height of the stock market upheaval, her company grew impressively. She had her second daughter in 2010, and worked a similar schedule the second time around, traveling, meeting, and running just as she had before she was pregnant (“I did get a little short of breath sometimes,” she admitted,”but that was it.”)