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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs was a CEO with terminal cancer. This hardly rates notice in comparison.

Jobs was already CEO again long before he had terminal cancer. Yahoo (presumably) knew Mayer was pregnant when they hired her, and made the decision anyway. Big difference.

> Yahoo (presumably) knew Mayer was pregnant when they hired her

That's a pretty big assumption.

Would she have been legally required to inform them before being hired?

No, nor could they have altered their decision based upon the information that she was pregnant, as this is one of the protected characteristics for labor purposes.

Unfortunately, the end result is that someone gets screwed either way: either the child misses out on his mother's attention during the most crucial moments of his growth, or Yahoo gets a CEO who isn't focused on restoring Yahoo.

Translation: women shouldn't be allowed to work since they need to be home birthing and raising babies?

Your statement implies that a woman can not do both. I know my wife would strongly disagree. I suspect many others would too.

The answer is no, she is not legally required to do so. (source http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/pregnancy.cfm)

Though it's none of our business, it's also not an assumption :)

http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yaho...

> Mayer first disclosed to the Yahoo board that she is pregnant in late June, in a meeting with Michael Wolf, a member of the board's four-person CEO search committee. A meeting with the search committee followed, and then Mayer met with the full board last Wednesday. 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.

Did they really have a choice at that point? Saying "no", for any reason, could have proven very expensive.

@grecy, no. Pregnancy is explicitly a protected class.

Jobs left the position and returned, the board could have decided to replace him with Cook at that point based on his health. I think you are right there is a big difference. Marissa will likely recover in a few weeks.

I agree that in that light, it shouldn't be. I think there are two things to consider though:

1) Steve Jobs took a lot of 'time off' over his last few years where he had to take a big step back. Apple could afford it because he dominated their culture even when he wasn't there.

2) I think the next year at Yahoo, if all goes as Yahoo investors would like, is more important existentially than the last year of Jobs tenure. I'm not saying the last year under Jobs wasn't big, but there is more pressure on her than Jobs had to do more to change the company.

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