this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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I remember that she was getting a lot of positive press because she was public about pregnancy or something but returned to full time work like 5 days after she gave birth which is dystopian as hell.
A real “girl boss” in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave and spend that time caring for the child and fighting to get those rights to everyone.
Didn't they put a nursery in her office or something? The average worker isn't getting the accommodations she had.
Exactly! And they held her up as some kind of symbol of women’s liberation.
"They" who?
She got press that pointed out she was a CEO who had dared to get pregnant. It seemed to me they were pointing out that 1) a CEO who took time off to give birth was bad, and 2) a woman who wouldn't take more maternity leave was also bad.
Way too much press about her was about her personal-life decisions rather than business prospects.
I read "girlboss" as strictly perjorative.
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
Uhhh... No, it is not.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave, and she took 2 and worked from home during. She said it wasn't part of the consideration of giving her the job when she was six months pregnant, do you honestly believe that?
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks "leave" while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision? Not a compromise to land the job that wouldn't have been offered if she wanted to take time to be with her child instead?
You and her are the ones perpetuating "CEO mom is impossible", unless they take barely any time off to be a mom and still work remotely while being "off".
I believe a mom can be CEO AND take the full maternity leave while knowing how to delegate and have minimal need to check-in for those 16 weeks. You believe she has to act like she didn't just have a baby and return to work as soon as humanly possible in order to be a CEO.
I don't see how you get this attitude, those conclusions, from anything I wrote.
Which is just a little bit shy of two years
No. But I think that decision was up to her and that the press should have treated it as not-newsworthy. Any amount of maternity leave that she chose was doomed to be criticized by somebody as the wrong amount. And so, it was.
No. CompactFlax posited that "A real 'girl boss' in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave," and I'm just observing there was no realistic possibility of that happening. If this is what you demand from a CEO mom, well, you're not getting that.
I don't understand how you think you know any such thing. I comprehensively don't think like this. I don't think there's any "has to," I think those arrangements should have been her own decision and it would be better to have minimal commentary on it.
The fact that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on her work/life balance and parenting decisions is the problem. Criticize her for her business decisions, criticize her for being an AI pusher, that's fine, that's appropriate.
When criticism focuses on "CEO mommy" topics, that is a mode and angle of criticism that no man ever seems to face in the tech/biz news. That is sexism. Obviously. What else would that be?
I was reacting to your wild conclusion.
"Choosing" your career over time with your newborn despite having the means to do so it's not "feminism" or "woman empowerment", it's capitalism and shitty parenting. I didn't like that you are conflating them.
At best I could accept the argument that she calculated the wealthy she could accumulate will serve her children long term better than spending time parenting them and leaving them with financial instability... But then that's not a choice, that's a difficult position forced on her but capitalism.
The idea that she "chose" to work through the two weeks and then return back to full time work and that choice being empowering is ridiculous. The idea that pointing that out is the equivalent of saying women can't be CEOs is sexist.
I took less than 2 weeks of paternity leave, but I would never suggest I chose that. I chose not to lose my job and keep a roof over my newborn's head, but that wasn't much of a choice.