For Executive Women, Is Maternity Leave Necessary?

“He looks like a little pumpkin,” her brother-in-law remarked. “You should dress him up as a pumpkin for Halloween.”

“I think we can come up with a more creative costume than that,” Mrs. Stern recalls replying. “But that reminds me. ...”

With that, she reached for her laptop and fired off an e-mail to an associate about a Halloween party being planned by her New York business, Divalysscious Moms.

One should note: this was in July.

“There wasn’t even a thought in my mind about taking a maternity leave,” said Mrs. Stern, whose oldest child was 3 at the time. “It was like, Oliver was going to be born, and he was, and life was going to be continuing in — I don’t want to say madness — but the way that I do business.”

Like many women, Mrs. Stern has followed the news that Marissa Mayer, the new chief of Yahoo, is pregnant with her first child, due in October. Ms. Mayer, 37, told Fortune that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”

With those nine words, she opened a new front in the debate over work-life balance and that nettlesome phrase “having it all.” The debate was already simmering in the wake of an article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who had been director of policy planning at the State Department but found, as she wrote, “that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Ms. Mayer’s approach? “I like to stay in the rhythm of things,” she told Fortune.

The reactions — on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere — have varied widely. Some criticized Ms. Mayer as a poor role model for working women. Others congratulated her for embracing two challenges at once. Another camp marveled at her naïveté about what was in store.

But what about women who have already taken the path of an abbreviated leave? What do they make of the feverish parsing of Ms. Mayer’s postpartum plans? In interviews, many said that for women at the top of their profession or running their own show, the decision to not take a traditional leave can feel like an empowering choice — and at the same time, not a choice at all.

“You can think of a lot of moms who have more than one child, and do they ever say, ‘I’m going to stop feeding my older child because I have a newborn’?” asked Pooja Sankar, 31, chief executive of Piazza, an online forum for teachers and students to solve problems. Ms. Sankar, who gave birth to her first child three weeks ago, thinks of Piazza as one of her own, too: “I’m the C.E.O. of a company. This ‘child’ depends on me to run, to exist, really.”

Many women have no choice but to quickly return to work because they need the paycheck or can’t risk losing their job. And waitresses, nannies and teachers, for instance, can’t send e-mails from their iPhones and call it “working.”

New parents with the financial means have solutions that others don’t when they have to answer to both a newborn and a boss. Ms. Mayer, for example, will be able to hire as many nannies and baby nurses as she needs. Ms. Sankar’s parents and in-laws are living in her home in Palo Alto, Calif.

When Ivanka Trump flew to Miami on business eight days after giving birth to her daughter, Arabella, last summer, she rode in her father’s plane, returning late that night.

“The nature of the projects I was working on required me to have a hyper-abbreviated maternity leave,” said Ms. Trump, 30. “Yes, there are times when I look back and wish that had not been the case. But it’s life, and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Still, the heavyweight questions that go beyond simple questions of money inevitably arise when a story like Ms. Mayer’s pops up. Is it progress for high-profile women to willingly forgo their right to a maternity leave? Or, by making maternity leave yet another victim of our always-on culture, does it send the message that taking true time off is only for the uncommitted?

These days, just as vacation is punctuated with work e-mails, maternity leave is not lived 100 percent disconnected, either. Some parents believe this half-on, half-off state is an unfair burden.

But some entrepreneurs like Maria Seidman, 34, of Manhattan say they don’t expect anything else. Two weeks ago, in the recovery room after the birth of her second child, she announced the event via (what else?) Yapp, the business she helped found. It helps people quickly publish mobile applications.

“Nobody had any expectations — not my team, my investors, or my family — that I would be in any way connected,” she said. “I wanted to do it. It was not an obligation. I was updating this app in real time, showing loved ones pictures of the baby. Was that work or life?”

Mrs. Seidman argued that maternity leave itself is “a false construct,” adding, “What does that mean in today’s fused world?”