The extraordinary departure of the women of Silicon Valley

(Bloomberg) — The resignation of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki after 25 years at Google is another example of a worrying trend in Silicon Valley: women in high positions are leaving.

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Just this week, the chief business officer of Meta Platforms Inc. Marn Levin retired after 12 years in social media. Last year, Sheryl Sandberg stepped down as Meta’s chief operating officer.

To be sure, powerful female figures remain in tech, but they tend to have lower social status. Safra Katz, CEO of Oracle Corporation, rarely gives interviews. Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, has yet to be interviewed, although she was promoted to the position last November. Lisa Jackson is one of five women on Apple’s leadership team, compared to 13 men. A notable exception is the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Lisa Su, who now frequently discusses the company’s earnings and launch reports with the press.

Every company and every woman has a story to tell, but it’s no secret that the pandemic has hit women especially hard. According to some estimates, about 2 million women quit or lost their jobs between February 2020 and January 2022, while the number of men in the labor force remained about the same. According to Lean In and McKinsey research, women leaders are also changing jobs at a record rate. In Silicon Valley, they quit their jobs, period.

Wojcicki spent nine years at the helm of YouTube, an incredibly long time for any Silicon Valley CEO, especially a non-founder. During her tenure as CEO of YouTube, she increased revenue to $29 billion and has over 2.5 billion active users. Prior to that, she helped create and grow Google’s now dominant advertising business.

Wojcicki swears he’s quitting his job, but he doesn’t disappear entirely. “I intend to continue supporting women in tech in my next chapter,” she wrote in an email, “I intend to mentor women leaders and CEOs and invest in companies founded and led by women!”

But she is clearly taking a big step to the side. Wojcicki’s name has always been the first to come up in conversations about who could replace the CEO of Alphabet Inc. Sundara Pichai. Now this seems unlikely. Other prominent women who have left tech leadership positions and disappeared from the limelight include former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, former HP and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, and former IBM CEO Ginny Rometty. All of them have been heavily criticized for their work, which at times can feel too personal.

For many women in tech, this is a worrying trend. “We have to figure out how to identify and support the next generation of women and minority leaders and make sure they don’t get discouraged,” says Eileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, who is also a founding member of All Raise. a non-profit organization that aims to encourage more women to invest in technology and entrepreneurship. “In this downturn, as companies lose line workers, they will become increasingly lonely. It’s really hard to be the only one. This is an additional payment for the fact that you carry this load on your shoulders.

For Sandberg, the bigger problem is that there simply aren’t enough women in top tech positions. “The problem isn’t that women are leaving,” says Sandberg, who joined Google’s advertising division in 2001, when Wojcicki was running it. “Firstly, the problem is that there are so few of us. No one writes articles about men leaving leadership positions. People are constantly leaving high-ranking positions. But because there are so few women in senior management, it’s more remarkable when it happens. We have to make the extraordinary ordinary.”

Wojcicki says she left her role for personal reasons. On her blog, she said she was starting a new chapter focusing on her family, health, and passion projects. She is also the mother of five children and has always shared her experiences openly, balancing the demands of her job with motherhood.

By any measure, she has achieved a lot. Some of the big ideas that emerged from Wojcicki’s time at YouTube include the launch of YouTube TV, Premium and Shorts, nurturing a new generation of creators, and developing important new policies on hate and misinformation. She also oversaw a video site that has battled such toxicity, especially during the pandemic. However, it is an outstanding legacy and should serve as a rallying cry for more women tech leaders.

(Corrects Ginny Rometty’s spelling in the seventh paragraph.)

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