Here’s a quote you don’t read very often, or perhaps ever, from a person who has just been hired as chief executive of a Fortune 500 company: “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”

On Monday, struggling tech giant Yahoo announced it was hiring Marissa Mayer as chief executive, the company’s fifth leader in five years. But there was even more news to come. The 37-year-old Mayer, a highly respected former Google executive, is pregnant — and the board knew all about it when it appointed her.

News of Mayer’s appointment spread from cubicles to Twitter feeds to day care pick-ups. Working mothers and workplace observers pronounced themselves encouraged that Mayer’s pregnancy was not a factor, somewhat annoyed that in 2012 a pregnant chief executive even merits conversation, and hopeful that she has one of those babies who sleep through the night.

“The question isn’t how is [Mayer] going to balance her work-family life, but it’s how do we ensure that companies are fully using the talent pool [including women of child-bearing years] so we can have an economic engine that will deliver a strong economy?” said Victoria Budson, the founding executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

This latest national conversation about working motherhood comes in the wake of last month’s hotly debated Atlantic magazine essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former high-ranking State Department official who wrote about the difficulties of women trying to “have it all.” Like so many others, Slaughter weighed in on Mayer’s situation on Twitter Tuesday: “Making it 2 CEO BEFORE kids isn’t realistic 4 most women & men. Hope @marissamayer can pioneer #flexwork 4 techworld as CEO.”