Marissa Mayer hits out at 'gender bias' as Yahoo is sold for $5bn 
 
 Verizon agreed to buy Yahoo’s core internet business for $4.83bn (£3.62bn) in cash on Monday, marking the final chapter in the struggling fortunes of the fading web pioneer. 
 
 Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive officer, has faced a barrage of criticism over her tenure. She hit out at “gender-charged” reporting in an interview with the Financial Times after the sale. 
 
 “I’ve tried to be gender-blind and believe tech is a gender-neutral zone but do think there has been gender-charged reporting,” she said. “We all see the things that only plague women leaders, like articles that focus on their appearance, like Hillary Clinton sporting a new pantsuit. I think all women are aware of that, but I had hoped in 2015 and 2016 that I would see fewer articles like that. It’s a shame.” 
 
 Verizon, the US’s largest telecommunications company by subscribers, will combine Yahoo with another fallen giant of the first internet age, AOL, which it bought last year for $4.4bn. 
 
 By the numbers: why big-name businesses are bidding for Yahoo Read more 
 
 After the deal, expected to be complete in 2017, Yahoo will be left as a holding company for its valuable stakes in web businesses in China and Japan. Yahoo has a 15% stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and a 35.5% interest in Yahoo Japan. 
 
 “The sale of our operating business, which effectively separates our Asian asset equity stakes, is an important step in our plan to unlock shareholder value for Yahoo,” Mayer said in a statement on Monday. 
 
 Founded in a Stanford University dorm room in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo as “Jerry and David’s Guide To The World Wide Web”, Yahoo grew rapidly through the 1990s to become one of the pre-eminent internet companies of its generation. 
 
 Offering email, news, shopping and search, Yahoo went public in 1996, with its share price soaring 154% on day one. In January 2000, Yahoo was valued at $125bn. But the company failed to keep pace with the changing tech landscape as Google came to dominate search and Facebook social media. 
 
 Microsoft launched a $44.6bn hostile bid for Yahoo in 2008. On Monday, the company was valued at $37bn while Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was valued at $518bn and Facebook at $349bn. 
 
 The new generation of tech companies have also outstripped Yahoo. Mayer’s company may still have more than one billion active monthly users but Verizon’s price is less than a quarter of Snapchat’s current valuation. 
 
 
 
 Yahoo will continue as an independent company until the deal receives shareholder and regulatory approval, the companies said. 
 
 The sale is an ignominious end to Mayer’s plans to turn Yahoo around. Mayer, a highly rated Google executive, joined Yahoo in July 2012. Before her arrival the company was in disarray and had had four CEOs in three years. 
 
 Mayer promised a “renewed focus on product innovation to drive user experience and advertising revenue”. But shareholders lost faith in her after a wild spending spree in which she tried to build Yahoo’s content business by adding the blog site Tumblr, for $1.1bn, and signed deals with TV news anchor Katie Couric and the National Football League that failed to pay off. 
 
 In a Tumblr blogpost, Mayer said she planned to stay at Yahoo, but Verizon’s Marni Walden, who will head the combined company, told CNBC the new leadership team had yet to be determined. 
 
 Should Mayer be forced out, she is in for a payoff of $137m. Yahoo’s boss has already taken home $78m since she was installed as CEO, according to the stock analytics firm MSCI. Based on the terms of the company’s most recent proxy statement, she will take home another $59m if she’s dismissed from the company after a buyout. 
 
 Some commentators were skeptical about the combined power of AOL and Yahoo. John Colley, a professor at Warwick Business School, said the merger was an alliance of two weak companies unlikely to form a single strong one. “Technology history is littered with the remnants of once all-powerful businesses – take Nokia and RIM, makers of the Blackberry,” Colley said. He said it was difficult to see how Verizon would benefit from this acquisition. 
 
 The sale does not include Yahoo’s cash, its shares in Alibaba, its shares in Yahoo Japan, Yahoo’s convertible notes, certain minority investments and Yahoo’s non-core patents. 
 
 
 
 The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan investments are worth about $40bn, while Yahoo had a market value of about $37.4bn as of Friday’s close. 
 
 Verizon prevailed over rival bidders for Yahoo, including AT&T; a group led by the Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and backed by the billionaire Warren Buffett; the private equity firm TPG Capital; and a consortium of buyout firms, Vector Capital and Sycamore Partners. 
 
 The telecoms company is hoping that a combined AOL and Yahoo will create a strong third player to compete with Alphabet and Facebook for online revenues. 
 
 Reuters contributed to this article ||||| With Verizon’s long-anticipated bid to buy Yahoo finally official, speculation turns to what happens to the Internet giant’s CEO, Marissa Mayer. 
 
 In a Tumblr post, Mayer wrote on Monday, “I’m planning to stay... It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter,” a position she reiterated in a CNBC interview Monday morning, although she also said she was “open minded” about the future. 
 
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 For some, this indicates that the onetime Google wunderkind might depart after the deal is finished in the first quarter of next year. 
 
 “It might be for a short period,” Morningstar equity analyst Ali Mogharabi said of the prospect of Mayer’s staying on. “They might need her input during the integration process.” 
 
 After that, though, all bets are off. 
 
 RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney said he expected AOL chief Tim Armstrong to lead the combined AOL-Yahoo company, calling him “a very seasoned internet executive,” in the CNBC interview. “He’s the right person to be running the combined assets,” Mahaney said. 
 
 Ultimately, staying at Yahoo might not be Mayer’s choice to make, pointed out Scott Kessler, equity analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. 
 
 “She started out with just so much interest and enthusiasm and and excitement… and the last year or two have been tremendously disappointing,” he said. 
 
 Since being tapped to run Yahoo in 2012 after a scandal involving previous CEO Scott Thompson misrepresenting his credentials, Mayer initially boosted her standing with workers by bringing in Google-style staff perks like free lunch and phones. 
 
 Her elimination of telecommuting in 2013 was less well received, though. Aside from running counter to the typical Silicon Valley corporate culture, which tends to encourage remote work, some charged that Yahoo’s ban was unfair to working parents, especially since it was widely reported that Mayer had a nursery built near her office to accommodate the baby boy she had a few months after taking the top spot at Yahoo. Mayer’s two-week maternity leaves, both in 2012 as well as three years later, when she had twin girls, also sparked a larger conversation about parental leave in the tech industry. 
 
 “She has become the face of Yahoo, for better or worse. She has become a lightning rod,” Kessler said. 
 
 Some of her choices when it came to Yahoo’s operations were also questioned, especially as the promised turnaround failed to materialize. 
 
 Read More: Yahoo to Lay Off 15 Percent of Workforce, Revamp Company 
 
 “I would say it’s pretty much a mixed bag,” Mogharabi said. “The acquisition of Brightroll was a good one,” he said of Yahoo’s 2014 purchase of the ad platform, but he pointed out that its 2013 purchase of microblogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion didn’t pay off the way the company hoped. 
 
 “While Marissa stabilized Yahoo during her tenure, she missed on the big trends,” Constellation Research founder and principal analyst R “Ray” Wang said via email. “Most folks would expect Marissa to leave within a year,” he noted. 
 
 Leaving could be lucrative for Mayer. According to Equilar, a compensation data and research firm, she will make just under $57 million if Verizon decides not to keep her on. Through the end of last year, Equilar estimates that Mayer earned nearly $219 million, including $115 million in “realized pay,” which includes her cash earnings, value of shares vested during her tenure and gains from exercising options. 
 
 That kind of money would give Mayer enough breathing room to take some time deliberating her next moves, which might be the best plan for her, Kessler suggested. 
 
 “I think she would benefit from some time between what she‘s doing now and what she’s going to do next,” he said. “There are a lot of options out there for her.”
– Marissa Mayer says coverage of her four years at the helm of Yahoo has been "gender charged." "We all see the things that only plague women leaders, like articles that focus on their appearance, like Hillary Clinton sporting a new pantsuit," she tells the Financial Times. "I think all women are aware of that, but I had hoped in 2015 and 2016 that I would see fewer articles like that. It’s a shame." It was announced Monday that Verizon would acquire the struggling Internet pioneer for $4.83 billion, which, per the Guardian, puts an "ignominious end to Mayer’s plans to turn Yahoo around." Mayer has been oft-criticized for how she has run Yahoo, with much of the criticism centering on "bad acquisitions and poor hires," per the Times, such as buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion—part of what the Guardian calls a "wild spending spree." In a post on that platform, Mayer writes, "I’m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter." But how long that will be remains to be seen. "It might be for a short period," an analyst tells NBC news. "They might need her input during the integration process."