Unfortunately, there's a segment of society that will extrapolate the high-profile failure of one woman to reaffirm their misguided belief that her gender was part of the reason for her failure.
Enron -> wow, Ken Lay sucks.
Theranos -> wow, women founders suck.
The mischaracterization of women sucks, don't get me wrong.
But there are so many other things wrong going on here that this comment really confused me.
I think there's a huge difference between the two. Sure, Ms. Meyer floundered running a big (struggling) company, especially when so much was made about "Female CEO!" But really, her "failure" is pretty average when it comes to corporate executive misadventure; nothing she did makes her unworthy of being a role-model.
Ms. Holmes, on the other hand, may have overseen a massive fraud.
I'd go as far as to say that if Meyer at least manages to unwind Yahoo gracefully, she may move on to greater success in the future in a similar position.
That's how I look at it. I'm still a fan of Meyer due to the great work she did at Google. That's where she showed her talents. Yahoo was a terrible situation... aimed at the ground calling for "Ludicrous Speed!"... and she failed on an attempt to turn it into a winner. Maybe wasn't greedy enough for shareholders or something. They'll make less money than they wanted to. (shrugs)
Honestly, of the various failures, that's the kind that bothers me the least. People tried to do something good for all parties but screwed up. Least they tried and didn't just suck wealth out of the company while setting it up to fail. Like recent IBM CEO did and similarly left mess in hands of a woman who will take fall if she can't 180 it. Actually, I haven't even looked at that story in a while so I don't know if she's even still there haha.
Anyway, I'll judge Meyer on her next play as Yahoo is an outlier.
Just got her a boost in my mind. From another perspective, it might have been easy for her if she was a non-geek with the ability to drill through people's BS. They'd have a disadvantage against her that people at C-level or non-geek management might not have. That's another angle I thought about.