10 Powerful Corporate Moms

When word of Marissa Mayer’s $71 million pay package to head a faltering Yahoo hit the news, it made headlines. When people found out the 37-year-old was pregnant with her first child, it made an even bigger impact, especially when Mayer revealed she’d be working throughout her maternity leave and would return to work three weeks later. While Mayer has had to break quite a few glass ceilings as a female in the tech world, she's not one to believe in stereotypes. "There's all kinds of different women who do this,” she told CNN earlier this year. "You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms."

Sheryl Sandberg was considering an offer to become a top officer at the Washington Post Company when she met Mark Zuckerberg in late 2007. He wasn’t even looking for a Facebook COO at the time, but thought the 42-year-old Harvard grad would elevate the company. The mom of two (her son is 7 and her daughter is 5) accepted the post at the social networking site, and has since insisted that a woman with power can have it all. “I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6.” Sandberg told Makers.com. ”I did that when I was at Google, I did that [at Facebook]," said Sandberg, whose husband David Goldberg is CEO of SurveyMonkey. "It’s not until [now] that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly."

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As the first woman to be Group President of Procter & Gamble North America, 51-year-old Melanie Healey frequently tops lists of the most powerful women in the business world. Mom to two teenagers, Healey advises women to take their careers one step at a time and enjoy everything life has to offer. “I would say you can't have it all at one time, but you probably can have just about most of what you want over time if you're willing to make the right choices,” she told the Wall Street Journal. Healey says that, as a working woman, you also have to deal with a certain amount of hidden bias. "It doesn't make it easy for women—and, frankly, men—to make the kind of bold decisions that enable a different kind of environment that promotes more women," she said.

When former director of General Motors Ellen Kullman was about to ink a deal with DuPont as CEO, she had a plan—until the economy tanked, taking the chemical company’s stock along with it. She spent 2009 and 2010 quickly correcting the damage and making DuPont more profitable than ever. But 56-year-old Kullman, a mom to a daughter, 21, and twin sons, 18, admits professionally, and at home, her success hasn’t come as easily as it might seem on the outside. "What I do is a labor of love, right? And you don't always get it right," said Kullman, according to CNN Money. "But you learn. … I'm a big believer that people and organizations—if they keep learning, they'll figure it out. If we stop learning, we stop growing."

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With a background as a lawyer to guide her, Angela Braly made the jump to health insurance when she joined Blue Cross as the company’s general counsel. When Wellpoint acquired Blue Cross, the 51-year-old exec rose through the company’s ranks to nab the title of CEO in 2007. A mom with three children, (aged 20, 17 and 14), Braly has vocally praised her husband for the success of her family and career, since he is a stay-at-home dad. “I so appreciate the choice that he's made—and he's so good at it,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I think this is where we're really sexist. We think, ‘How is this going to work?’ And it's fabulous, it works really well.”

Indra Nooyi boasts an impressive résumé. Not only did she hold positions at Johnson & Johnson, Booz & Company, the Boston Consulting Group and Motorola before joining PepsiCo as CEO in 2006, but she was also a cricket player and lead guitarist of an all-girl rock band growing up in India. But although Nooyi—whose two children are now 21 and 19—has had a lot on her plate at any given time, she has learned to balance the two by acknowledging her limitations: "The first thing I’d say to women is put aside the guilt," she told Good Housekeeping. "I think we’re all genetically programmed to feel guilty for not giving total effort at the job. If we do, we worry that we’re not giving it all at home to the kids or to our spouse. If you give up the guilt, that’s a huge load off your shoulders."

Meg Whitman’s career has brought her from power positions at Hasbro and eBay, to a stint running for governor of California in 2010 and her current post as CEO of computer giant Hewlett-Packard. But is Whitman, a mom to two children (ages 24 and 27) living proof that women have to sacrifice something along the way? When she was running for governor, people were shocked to find out Whitman, 55, didn’t vote in an election until age 46. "I was focused on raising a family, on my husband's career, and we moved many, many times," she said, according to TPM. We're guessing with all those things on your plate, something has to hit the wayside.

It took 29 years from the time she worked as a Xerox intern, but Ursula Burns, 53, climbed all the way through the ranks to CEO in 2009. A mom to two children (now ages 23 and 20) Burns also held board positions at companies like American Express and the MIT Corporation. “My mother raised us to think that if we worked hard, and if we put our end of the bargain in, it would work out OK for us,” Burns told NPR, a lesson she surely instills in her two children, as well.

When someone called into question this mom of three's ability to take the CEO position at JPMorgan, that person was dismissed in resounding fashion. “I can’t imagine someone saying that about a man with two children,” Callahan, 44, recalled to Forbes. After grabbing an MBA from Harvard and holding jobs at Stein Roe & Farnham and Bankers Trust, Callahan now rules over a whopping $1.3 trillion of assets at JPMorgan Chase.

Her résumé boasts senior positions at Procter & Gamble, Pepsi and Nestle throughout the 1980s, all while raising two daughters (now ages 33 and 31). But when Denise Morrison made the jump from Executive VP and General Manager at Kraft Foods to Campbell Soup Company's President of Global Sales and Chief Communication Officer in 2003, she blasted to the top of the corporate ladder, becoming President and CEO in 2011. "I believe the source of happiness is achievement and self-esteem," Morrison told CNN Money. "And that comes from contributing. So I took the attitude that my job as a parent was to bring my girls up to let them go. Ambition is a part of femininity. So you can be ambitious and you can be feminine and that's both OK."