Marissa’s Choice: Media Coverage of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

This study examines the American business media’s presentation of the ideal worker/ideal mother conflict, as seen in the 2012-2013 coverage of Marissa Mayer, the then newly appointed, pregnant CEO of the prominent internet company Yahoo. Pregnancy, maternity leave, and childcare are issues that foreground a seemingly unresolvable dilemma for working women who are also mothers: how to meet competing societal pressures to be both an ‘ideal worker’ and an ‘ideal mother’. It might be tempting to dismiss Mayer’s experience as irrelevant to the vast majority of working mothers, given her exalted position and the plethora of options available to her. However, I will argue that the media coverage of Mayer illuminates the double-bind that all working mothers face and the often obscured inequities embedded in the idea of ‘choice’, a neoliberal construct continually invoked in media representations of work and motherhood.