When Yahoo recently announced Marissa Mayer as its new CEO and only the 20th female CEO in the Fortune 500 you'd kinda expect women to cheer. But Mayer's golden opportunity, her $70 million pay package and the fact that one of the world's largest Internet companies is literally putting its fate into her capable hands hardly entered into public reaction. Because Mayer is pregnant. And while countless working women around the world have managed to successfully balance a baby in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, few are cheering Mayer's drive to have it all.

In fact, most of the buzz appears to be centered around Mayer's decision to only take a few weeks of maternity leave - and work through it to boot. The overwhelming reaction is that if this first-time mom can handle the challenge, it'll mean a sacrifice of the leave-the-baby-at-home-with-a-nanny variety. It'll mean being torn between motherhood and a career that up to this point, has been her baby. And the underlying current in all of this debate is that whatever arrangement Mayer works out, it will (or should) entail feeling very, very guilty. Whether that guilt should be directed at the fact that she won't be the kind of mother who spends all day making nutritious meals and attending playgroups or because at 37, she's already worth a fortune (and hasn't she done enough?), isn't clear.

What is clear is that when a woman dares to make no apologies, to be employed, ambitious and hungry for more, it makes everyone a little uncomfortable, and perhaps women most of all. And swirling in all that debate is one fundamental truth that persists about women despite all the doors that continue to open for us: we have a hard time owning that success, even when, as in Mayer's case, it isn't our own.

Guilty as she is

According to a 2010 survey out of Britain, 96 percent of women feel guilty at least once a day. Two of the top things that plague them? Not spending enough time with family and neglecting work. For working mothers, that means guilt when they work late, when they don't have time to bake a homemade birthday cake, or when they make the time to do it anyway. In other words, many women are feeling intensely guilty almost all of the time.

Men? Not so much. Ninety-two percent of the survey's respondents said that men feel less guilt than women. (Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg admitting that building Facebook left him racked with a sense of personal failure?)

Indeed, have you ever seen a successful man who didn't totally own it? Or, come to think of it, a really successful woman for that matter? Neither have we. So maybe it's time for women to own their success and applaud it in others - rather than be ashamed of it. Here's why...

Designer swag is lovely, but what women really need to be sporting is swagger, and for one very obvious reason: because we can. Women are entering an era where we have more choices than ever before. The choice to step up to the plate in a game that only recently became co-ed; the choice to get into the game without an assumption of handicap; the choice to succeed; and even the choice to walk away from it all whether to raise a family or just because we want to.

Now about success; it isn't something that happens accidentally while we aren't paying attention. It's a choice. (Mayer, for example, is a hard-driving tech superstar and design genius who graduated with honours from Stanford University, routinely puts in 90-hour work weeks, and runs marathons in her spare time.)

So whether you're leading a company or kicking butt at managing your household, give yourself some credit. Women now have more options than ever, but the bottom line is that if you work hard at what you do, you're choosing success, and that's nothing to be ashamed about.

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You go girl: Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about your success