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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Read the article again. Notice how many of the ways in which she was being criticized were things you could only really say about a woman?

Having enemies comes with the job. Your enemies will attack you as they can. Being a woman gives them culturally acceptable ways to attack you that they can't use against men.

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Well, yes, but her opponents are also dismissed as "macho loudmouth[s]", which is something you can only really say about a man.

That's not to say that all of the criticism of Mayer is fair or justified. I imagine that very little of it is. But I suspect that she's being criticised much more for having ideas, and the will to pursue them, than she is for being female (say, an 80/20 split). But it's a lot easier for people who don't care about the intricacies of Yahoo's product strategy to talk about her gender than it is to talk about her ideas for Yahoo's products.

I think the language is indicative of an entrenched male culture at the top trying to cope with a strong female leader from the outside. It's kind of the worst of both worlds. Sure, being a woman isn't the only thing, Mayer is also in tech. Top management probably finds that weird, too. However, calling her things like "a princess" or "stuck up" is incredibly patronizing and sexist. Everybody knows those words pretty much don't apply to grown men in a situation like this. That's to say, given the set of circumstances the semantics of these labels are specific to her gender.

I can't help but think people take issue with her gender, and then criticize her on the product front specifically so do they don't look sexist....which is why you see all this criticism that lacks proper justification about her strategy at Yahoo.

I don't think people criticize male CEOs as much for "having ideas and the will to pursue them." You can't say there isn't a gender-based double standard for CEOs obsessed with product to the degree that they sometimes offend their employees. Steve Jobs was known to berate and verbally abuse his employees, but people excused it because he was a "genius" and a "visionary". Meanwhile, the worst Mayer has done is ask work-from-home employees to return to the office and people call her a "princess".

Not necessarily disagreeing, but if a male CEO was posing in a fashion magazine, he would get just as much criticism.

Missing the point: a male CEO wouldn't pose in a fashion magazine because that's not how we treat men.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/men-ups-manly-men-in-classic...

See how peculiar it looks?

I'm curious. Googling reveals that these posts are fairly common. The funny thing is that there aren't any photos of women in stereotypically male poses. Is that because there aren't any such poses or because no one feels a need to try it out? I'd like to see if those look as ridiculous.

Mayer chose to pose in a fashion magazine. She wasn't "treated" any way in this case.

Really? Like Donald Trump on the cover of GQ? How much criticism did he get for that?

I think you're underestimating the amount of criticism she got. It's been pretty crazy.

a. What's wrong with a fashion magazine? Vogue adds a metric ton more value to civil discourse than most business magazines combined.

b. Given the borderline-soft-porn treatment Elon Musk gets around here, I think we should collectively hold off on criticizing anyone for going overboard on such matters.

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