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CEO
Yahoo
| Appointee | Marissa Mayer |
|---|---|
| Role | CEO |
| Organisation | Yahoo |
| Domain | Corporate Leadership |
| Start | 17 July 2012 |
| End | 13 June 2017 |
| Notes | First woman CEO of Yahoo |
Institutional context
Yahoo! was a major US technology company founded in 1995. The CEO is the senior officer. From 1995 through July 2012 every permanent CEO was male.
Career path
Marissa Mayer (born 1975) earned a BS in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford. She was Google employee number 20, joining the company in 1999 as the first woman engineer. She served as Vice President of Search Products and User Experience and later as Vice President of Local, Maps and Location Services at Google.
Appointment
Yahoo announced her appointment as President and CEO on 16 July 2012, effective 17 July 2012. She is the first woman CEO of Yahoo and was, at the time of appointment, the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Tenure
Five years. Tenure included substantial product-strategy reorientation, the acquisition of Tumblr in 2013, the disclosure of two large historical user-data breaches (2013 and 2014, disclosed in 2016), and the eventual sale of Yahoo's core internet business to Verizon Communications. She left the CEO role on 13 June 2017 following the Verizon acquisition.
Cluster context
Mayer's 2012 appointment is contemporaneous with Rometty's at IBM (six months earlier). The 2012 pairing initiated the dataset's corporate-leadership 2012-2014 wave: Rometty (IBM 2012), Mayer (Yahoo 2012), Hewson (Lockheed 2013), Novakovic (GD 2013), Barra (GM 2014), Su (AMD 2014), Wojcicki (YouTube 2014). Seven major-firm first-woman CEO events in less than three years.