Did You Hear There's a New CEO in Town?

Have you heard about the new CEO of Yahoo? Yesterday the new 37-year-old, with dual computer science degrees from Stanford, joined fellow Stanford grads Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google fame as a leader of a U.S. big-business. Here is a list of other well-known CEOs who call Stanford their alma mater:

• Doris Fisher (Gap)
• Reed Hastings (Netflix)
• William Hewlett* and David Packard* (Hewlett-Packard)
• Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
• Phil Knight (Nike)
• Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems)
• Charles R. Schwab, (Charles Schwab Corp.)
• Peter Thiel (PayPal)
• Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!)
• executives Steve Ballmer (Microsoft)

The newly appointed Yahoo CEO is a venerable veteran of search, joining Google 13 years ago as employee number 20. Are you familiar with the sparse Google homepage, which Bing would later improve upon? That was one of their hundreds of projects they led as VP of Search Product.

Oh yeah, the new CEO — Marissa Mayer — is a female. And pregnant.

While these two points should not matter in a meritocracy, the public (or the perspective as presented by the media) is all atwitter about the new CEO's gender, and state of reproduction.

We get the gender thing — Ms. Mayer now joins a shortlist of women in a male-dominated technology industry. This list includes the likes of Meg Whitman, who led Ebay and now Hewlett-Packard, Virginia Rometty, head of I.B.M., and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO. And that's about it. In fact, the Fortune 500 currently allows only 15 women into the CEO position, or a meager 3%. That is a strange stat considering that Fortune 500 companies tend to flourish under women-led leadership compared to the S&P index.

But what we really don't get is all the discussion about Mayer's reproductive timeline. Most CEO's have kids. In fact, all but two members of the female CEO elite at big U.S. businesses — about 90 percent — had motherhood in common by 2009. In other words, most big-company CEOs are mothers, too. And while it can be noted that Ms. Mayer's is the first pregnant Fortune 500 CEO, there have been plenty of males who were, you know, "involved" with babies while serving as a Fortune 500 CEO.

In our opinion, what makes Ms. Mayer's Fortune 500 success so amazing is her very, very young age — in 2005 found a whopping 99 percent of the S&P 500 were 40 or above.

• Below 39: 1%
• 40-49 years old: 19%
• 50 - 59 years old: 56%
• 60 - 69: 21%
• 70 and above: 3%

Kudos to Marissa Mayer and her husband of 3 years Zachary Bogue on their new-found career success and upcoming family, and the board of Yahoo for breaking down some glass ceilings.