London - As a stream of young mothers and other home workers file reluctantly back into the steel-and-glass Silicon Valley headquarters of internet giant Yahoo!, the company can only hope they don’t hear the sounds of a happy child at play coming from the office of their boss, Marissa Mayer.
Or, to be precise, from the adjoining private nursery she has built there, solely to look after her young son.
Tact has not so far proved to be one of the internet queen’s strong points since she took over the billion-dollar company last July. But she has surpassed herself now, sending millions of Yahoo! employees who formerly worked from home - known as telecommuters - into an apoplectic fury.
The 37-year-old mother of one has demanded that all the company’s telecommuters, who work at locations across the world, report back to their offices and work only from there.
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” announced a memo from Mayer, which gave them until June 1 to be back at their desks. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
The order - which reportedly followed Mayer’s unhappiness at seeing how late the office car park filled up in the morning and how early it emptied at 5.30pm - applies not only to those who work from home full-time, but even those who take one or two days a week away from the office.
Her injunction sits oddly within the internet industry. After all, their very product was supposed to usher in a new era of flexible working.
But the call from Mayer has proved particularly stinging for Yahoo! staff, given her own rather more privileged childcare arrangements.
The steely chief executive took just a fortnight’s maternity leave (rather ironically, she worked from home during this fortnight) and has since paid to install her five-month-old son Macallister in a purpose-built - and fully staffed - private nursery next to her office.
“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work?” the husband of one remote-working Yahoo employee mused bitterly.
Many other appalled workers -and not only at Yahoo! - are asking the same question, and wondering if Mayer’s action could herald a backlash against flexible working hours for mothers.
“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honour the thankless sacrifices women too often make,” a Yahoo! insider told an online industry website.
Even Richard Branson has added to the storm of international criticism of Mayer and her apparent double standards, describing her latest demand as a “backwards step”.
Other internet companies make a virtue of allowing staff to work from home. At Google, where Mayer was an executive before taking over its troubled rival last summer, staff use their own judgment to decide where they work best.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, tech companies love to portray themselves as somehow more enlightened and “right on” than the rest of big business, only for a string of scandals - from Facebook’s cynical incursions into users’ privacy to Apple’s alleged reliance on virtual slaves in Chinese factories - to expose their failings.
And Mayer, who at 33 was the youngest woman to make Fortune magazine’s annual list of America’s most powerful businesswomen, has similarly disappointed those who hailed her as a champion of working mothers.
Asked two months ago about her priorities in life, she was adamant. “For me it’s God, family and Yahoo! - in that order,” she said. It’s the sort of fatuous statement that slips lightly off the tongue of US business bosses (especially female ones) who don’t like to look too career-obsessed.
But for Mayer to claim that she put family before the company immediately raised eyebrows.
Just a few months earlier she had run into criticism for taking over the struggling internet giant when she was five months pregnant, and for that two-week maternity leave (most women take at least six months off).
She then made it worse by suggesting that it was a doddle to juggle raising a baby with running a company with an annual £2.6 billion revenue. “The baby’s been easy - way easier than anyone made it out to be,” she trilled in a rare public interview.
We should point out that Mayer, who is worth about £200 million, is on a basic £77 million five-year contract with Yahoo! but could earn as much as £45 million a year from shares and bonuses.
The possibility that a woman rich enough to have an army of staff might experience new motherhood in a drastically different way to the average working mother was left unsaid.
Could this so-called champion of working moms have been more insensitive? The answer, it now appears, with her private nursery and “back to the office” directive, is yes, she could.
Mayer, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, has had a meteoric rise even by the youthful standards of Silicon Valley, where people (invariably men) can head huge businesses almost straight from university.
The ballet-dancing daughter of an art-teacher mother and engineer father from Wisconsin, Mayer claims she was “gender oblivious” growing up. So oblivious, apparently, that she insists she didn’t even notice she was the only woman in the top computer sciences class at America’s top science university, Stanford.
“I don’t think I would consider myself a feminist… I don’t think I have the sort of militant drive and sort of chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that,” she has said.
She became the 20th person to join Google, and its first female engineer, when it started in 1999.
During 13 years at the internet behemoth she created Google’s famous minimalist home page, rose to vice president and was hailed as the company’s most glamorous employee.
Unsurprisingly, she has attracted huge media attention.
Glamour magazine named her one of its women of the year, and American Vogue wrote a glowing profile of her, claiming that she was the world’s “most poised and powerful information guru”.
It simultaneously drooled over her shoe collection, her obsession with the designer Oscar de la Renta (she is one of his biggest customers) and her £3.3 million penthouse home above the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
With her husband Zachary, a wealthy lawyer, she has two other luxurious homes: a loft in the centre of San Francisco and a $3.4 million (£2.2 million) house in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto.
She says her favourite possession is her £13,000 gold Omega watch, because it reminded her how clever she had been buying it in Zurich when the Swiss currency was weak.
And in true over-achieving style, she and her husband boast of their passion for cooking gourmet feasts, as well as their love of doing marathons and triathlons.
If Mayer’s effortlessly smug lifestyle and corporate hypocrisy aren’t annoying enough for you, she also likes to communicate in the gobbledegook of management-speak, describing herself as being ‘really internally focused’ and accusing colleagues of ‘highlighting the metrics they like’.
One set of “metrics” Mayer has clearly taken to heart is research which suggests that, while homeworkers are usually just as productive as office staff, they are often not as innovative because they are deprived of creative interaction with colleagues.
Yahoo!, which is losing out to Google as an internet search engine, certainly needs to be innovative.
But if, as millions of British homeworkers must fear, Mayer’s diktat inspires other employers to follow suit, she will have few friends in the office, no matter what she does for Yahoo!’s fortunes.
The US is a country of workaholics but it seems American women have had enough of businesswomen telling them they, too, could successfully juggle family and career if they tried harder.
Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and Silicon Valley’s “other” glamorous woman tycoon, has already been demonised over reports that her forthcoming book will call on fellow working mothers to be more hard-working in the office. Sandberg earns more than £20 million a year.
Some hoped that if anyone would be sympathetic to working parents, it would be a woman who persuaded Yahoo! to hire her when she was pregnant.
But while Marissa Mayer clearly realises her child needs his mother in his early years, her maternal instincts don’t seem to extend far beyond her office door. - Daily Mail