Female CEOs

What a day for female CEOs.  Marissa Mayer becoming the CEO of Yahoo! and lo and behold, she is having a baby. Talk about agita. I thought it would be interesting to see how many mentions of pregnancy came up when searching for Marissa Mayer and Google or Yahoo! So I started by first looking at Marissa Mayer and Google or Yahoo!  There were zero mentions on the days leading up to the announcement (good to hear that there are some secrets in this world) but on the day of the announcement (7/16), there were 125 mentions and 449 one day later (7/17).

What about when we add on “pregnancy.” On Day 1 and 2, there were 70 mentions of Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! and pregnant or pregnancy.  It felt like that is all I read about so I was surprised that there was not more.

However, what would happen if we looked at Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! and pregnant or pregnancy compared to Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! and “qualified” or “qualifications” or “qualification”?  Oops, there were only 9 mentions. So the PREGNANCY of new CEO Mayer at Yahoo! outweighed mentions of her QUALIFICATIONS about 8 times over. That sounds like a story in itself.

As my colleague Liz said to me,  “She really blows the first 100 day CEO model out of the water. Maybe this is a new book for you to write, Leslie. Your new model can be segmented by trimesters.”  That certainly got me laughing.