Marissa Mayer Being Pregnant When She Starts Her Job As Yahoo CEO Is Huge For Women

It has been a really big week for Marissa Mayer. Yesterday it was announced that the Google VP would be the new CEO of Yahoo and would start right away. And yesterday she tweeted she is also pregnant with her first child, due in October. This is a really great thing. Not only because of the miracle of life and all that fun stuff but because this is another way Mayer, who is a huge advocate of more girls going into technology, is saying you can be a working woman in this business, and you can have kids too.

This pregnancy will not slow down Mayer in any way (she said she plans on working through her three-week maternity leave) but she did have to think about it when the Yahoo job came up in June. As for telling the board, which she is now a member of, that she was pregnant when she accepted a job couldn’t have been easy, but Marissa said it went well. None of the Yahoo directors, she says, revealed any concern about hiring a pregnant chief executive. “They showed their evolved thinking,” says Mayer, who got the phone call last Thursday that she was the board’s choice to be CEO.

I also have a feeling the board knows Marissa will not make a big deal about being pregnant at work. The tech wiz has said in the past she has always been not very “gender aware” or “gender blind” rather. When she was taking computer science and cognitive classes in college she didn’t really notice she was the only woman in most of her classes or one of only a few women until a college columnist wrote about “the blond woman in all of the upper-level comp classes.” Marissa said if she had thought about being one of the only girls it would have made her more self conscious so she was glad she didn’t notice. This helped her when she was the only woman at Google as well.