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  Still, Wojcicki, Mayer, and Sandberg all broke through the “Silicon Ceiling” in their own way. There are lessons to be learned in the stories we’ve created about them (or didn’t create in Wojcicki’s case). These stories deserve our attention because they will have a lasting impact as a new generation of women struggles to climb the tech industry ladder.

  Wojcicki is the only one left at Google. As the CEO of YouTube, she’s grown revenues by billions of dollars (total YouTube revenues could surpass $12 billion in 2017, according to one third-party analyst) and launched a new TV subscription business to take on Netflix, streaming services, and cable companies. Forbes recently ranked her as the eighth most powerful woman in the world. Nevertheless, the media has never gushed over Susan Wojcicki, nor has it picked her apart. What it has done instead is virtually ignore her—an oversight that becomes more astonishing the more you look at her career.

  In fact, not only did Wojcicki help pioneer Google’s advertising models; she was also the lead in two of the company’s most critical acquisitions, including the purchase of YouTube itself—for $1.65 billion in 2006. It’s now one of the company’s crown jewels. Wojcicki also oversaw Google’s deal to buy the online advertising company DoubleClick in 2007 for the more breathtaking sum of $3.1 billion, giving the company a critical opening into the display-ad business.

  The first mom on staff, Wojcicki has had five children in her twenty years at Google and has unapologetically made them a priority, priding herself on being home by 6:00 p.m. for family dinners. She doesn’t pretend to be a supermom. When I met her for the first time, at a speaking engagement in 2015, and marveled at her ability to run YouTube while raising five kids, she frankly volunteered that she had plenty of help at home.

  One job she hasn’t delegated is breast-feeding, and she’s even open about that. When she attended the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016, she stored two containers of her breast milk on the snowy ledge outside her hotel window and tweeted a photo of the setup with the comment “One advantage of the cold weather at #Davos2016 is it’s easy to store breast milk. No freezer required.”

  The Davos tweet is one example of Wojcicki’s overall approach to work and family: she doesn’t seem to separate her mom and executive mom personas. She has talked openly about being the “mom of Google,” nurturing company projects and taking pride in how the company grew and matured. And she thinks the time constraints of motherhood have made her a better executive.

  “When I’m in the office, I am really, really focused and I’m prioritizing,” she told me. “I can’t stay there until midnight. I can’t work weekends.” Because of the time pressure, she says, she isn’t tempted to waste the company’s time on problematic projects. “Let’s just forget about all those other things that are growing slowly; they’re not going anywhere. I don’t have time for that. I’m gonna focus on the big ideas, and we’re gonna get them done now,” Wojcicki told me.

  Despite her impact on Google, and her profound effect on the worlds of advertising and publishing, Wojcicki is largely unknown outside the tech industry. Google her name, and the number of results is hardly impressive: about the same as an average baseball player and fewer than many entrepreneurs who are far less successful than she is. In an American culture that has glorified and glamorized internet pioneers, Wojcicki’s story remains largely untold. That’s partly because she deliberately chooses to keep a low public profile. But even if she doesn’t sing her own praises, why haven’t others taken notice and told her story? As a journalist, I can think of one reason: it’s easier to get a story printed or aired if it fits a preconceived idea. The story of the internet, the media has decided, is the tale of internet start-ups driven by brilliant nerds or bros of a certain age. The story of a brilliant woman who every day manages to prioritize both her work and her family just doesn’t fit that stereotype of the high-rolling, risk-taking genius tech revolutionary.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF MARISSA MAYER

  Only forty-two (as of this writing), Marissa Mayer has received a lot of press in the first half of her work life. Reporters frequently note her blond, fashion-conscious, all-American beauty. Mayer seemed comfortable in the spotlight, happy to step in as a spokesperson for Google’s media-shy founders. For many years she flourished at Google before being pushed out of Page’s inner circle after a reorganization in 2010. She went from being search product head to vice president of location and local services, a change that many industry observers saw as a step down. Page’s reasons were never clearly spelled out, but insiders report that over the years Mayer had become a sharply polarizing figure whose colleagues either loved her or couldn’t stand her. Mayer often had a strict vision she would try to implement, and it often rubbed people the wrong way. Of course, being prickly and uncompromising has been a lauded attribute for male leaders in tech. “Steve Jobs had a very top-down thing going on for him, and that worked for Apple,” Laura Holmes said. “Did it work better for Apple because he was a man? I don’t know, so it’s kind of hard to say.”

  In June 2012, about a year after she was moved out of the inner circle, Mayer arranged a meeting with Sergey Brin. The quirky Google co-founder wheeled into her office on Rollerblades (twenty minutes late, in typical Brin fashion), and Mayer told him the news: she was leaving Google to become CEO of Yahoo. Brin was magnanimous, wished her luck, and famously told her to “be bold.”

  But Mayer had already been bold. In accepting the Yahoo offer, she was leaving the rocket ship that was Google to try to save an iconic company that was in a death spiral. She became the youngest of just twenty women CEOs running Fortune 500 businesses at the time.

  Just a few hours after the official announcement, the news got even more interesting. That was when the world learned Mayer was also the first woman to become CEO of such a large public company while pregnant. For months, she had chosen to keep the pregnancy a secret from most; she didn’t even tell Brin in their resignation conversation. But by late afternoon, Mayer decided it was safest to announce this twist before the rumor mill got started (she was already twenty-eight weeks along). She decided to call the journalist Pattie Sellers, known for hosting Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, but had to ring her multiple times before Sellers finally returned her call. “I’ve got a story for you, and you need to write it right now,” Mayer said. In the story, Mayer revealed not only that she was pregnant but also that she planned to take only the briefest of maternity leaves in order to focus on Yahoo. As the news shot around the world, journalists, pundits, and fellow moms instantly weighed in to suggest she was shirking her responsibilities as a mother, a business leader, or both. Forbes wrote, “New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Is Pregnant. Does It Matter?” and “The Pregnant CEO: Should You Hate Marissa Mayer?,” while Fortune ran the headline “Marissa Mayer’s Brief Maternity Leave: Progress or Workaholism?” One blogger quipped, “Marissa Mayer becomes CEO of Yahoo and proves women cannot have it all.”

  If Mayer had been a man expecting a child, none of those stories would have been written. The press probably wouldn’t have thought it was important; in fact, journalists very likely wouldn’t even have known.

  Does Mayer think she was treated differently by the press and industry analysts because she was a woman? “Anything that’s odd or unusual gets more scrutiny, and I think it got more scrutiny because it was odd or unusual. The pregnancy, being a woman, it’s correlative, not causal,” Mayer told me when I met her in 2016 at Yahoo headquarters. “Is it because people like to scrutinize women more? No, it’s because people like to scrutinize.”

  By that point, Mayer had been leading the company for four years and pointed to new revenue streams that she had grown to $2 billion. She had, however, spent big on poor acquisitions and ultimately failed to turn the company around. When she and I spoke, Mayer had recently struck a deal to sell what was left of Yahoo to Verizon, but there were complications. Hackers had compromised one billion user accounts (in 2017
, it was revealed all three billion accounts were affected), and the deal was in peril. Despite the stress, however, Mayer seemed as calm and in charge as ever; it was just another high-stakes moment in a life that has been filled with them.

  In those years, she had given birth to her first child, a boy, and, in another headline-sparking move, set up a nursery for him at her office. She’d also had a pair of identical twin daughters in 2015, then just a year old. Even though Mayer has made it clear that she doesn’t feel the press treated her unfairly, I wondered aloud if all the negativity about her choices around work and motherhood had ever gotten to her. If all the criticism ever hurt her feelings.

  “Overall, no, I was really pretty blind to all of it. Every now and then, you just sort of have to let the pettiness end,” Mayer reflected. “There were literally hundreds if not thousands of articles, prime ministers commenting on my maternity leave. I didn’t say it was appropriate for people in your country or anyone other than me, but I just chose to rise above it.” She adds, “I don’t think [the criticism] comes from an angry place.”

  But didn’t it bother her that everything she said and did seemed to be taken as some kind of broader social statement about working motherhood?

  “I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to say this is what’s right for me, given my circumstances,” Mayer told me. “I had been planning a six-month maternity leave at Google; it would have been glorious. There was no way I could have come to Yahoo for two weeks and be gone for six months. Life changes, and in the moment, I needed to come back more quickly.”

  What Mayer doesn’t say is that it was a no-win situation. Had she taken a longer maternity leave, no doubt she would have been criticized for imperiling Yahoo’s future, or even for accepting the job in the first place. When she set up an office nursery so she could be closer to her baby, she was accused of setting a double standard by enjoying a privilege not available to lower-level employees. When Mayer ended Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, available to all but frequently used by employees who were mothers, billionaire Richard Branson told me she would be on the wrong side of history. What got buried in the avalanche of coverage was the rationale for Mayer’s decision: that some Yahoo employees (both men and women) had not appeared in the office for some time and she questioned their productivity—something Mayer needed to increase, across the company, if Yahoo was going to stop spinning around the drain. It seems unlikely that a new CEO who swept in and changed Yahoo’s policy would have drawn much notice, much less criticism—assuming that new CEO was a man.

  In the spring of 2017, the business wires lit up again with news about Mayer. With Verizon’s $4.5 billion purchase of Yahoo about to close, she was expected to step away from the company. Over her time as Yahoo CEO, the stock price more than tripled, thanks in large part to the company’s lucrative investment in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, yet Mayer seemed to have acquired even more detractors. Her payout package, estimated to be close to $190 million, was widely criticized.

  Of our three Google heroines, Mayer, in my mind, is the one who most attempted to step into the stereotype of the rock star entrepreneur, which had been mostly reserved for men. That she wasn’t able to turn Yahoo around like Jobs turned around Apple after his return in 1997 has engendered the story that this woman didn’t have the right stuff. Here’s another story that might be told: Mayer took a grand risk and may have done the best anyone could have, after being dealt a losing hand.

  LEANING IN

  Sheryl Sandberg’s impact on both tech and our cultural conversation about women in the workplace has been more dramatic than both Mayer’s and Wojcicki’s. I suspect that the full impact of her influence is still gaining force. In 2007, Sandberg—who was then still a VP at Google—was considering a job as a senior executive at the Washington Post Company. Then she met Mark Zuckerberg at a holiday party. After several meetings, dinners, breakfasts, and phone calls, she joined Facebook as its COO, Zuckerberg’s number two, in 2008. Google’s top brass discussed with Sandberg the possibility of her becoming the search engine’s CFO, but the opportunity at Facebook was bigger.

  Letting Sandberg go was a big mistake.

  Facebook pre-Sandberg had a classic Brotopia reputation. One particularly cringe-inducing video interview with Zuckerberg circa 2005 shows the mostly male Facebook staff doing keg stands in their Palo Alto office. It was known as a boys’ club where the fastest way to get ahead was to become Zuckerberg’s buddy. One former employee said that Facebook was “basically a frat” before Sandberg showed up. Clearly, Sandberg’s hire was part of an effort to bring some maturity to the organization.

  In her first years at the company, Sandberg built Facebook’s business model from scratch, and it is now Google’s biggest competitor in the advertising business. Under her direction, Facebook’s revenues multiplied nearly a hundred times between 2008, when Sandberg signed on, and 2016, when the company generated $10 billion in profit. She also immediately started counting the number of Facebook’s female engineers and started a speaker series for women at the company, inviting guests like Gloria Steinem—similar to the events she had organized at Google.

  In 2010, Sandberg gave a now-famous TED talk in which she called out the lack of women leaders in business and government and called on women in the workforce not to “lean back” prematurely in their careers. Two years later, the Atlantic published an article by the public policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in which she attacked Sandberg directly. “Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach,” Slaughter wrote. “We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: ‘What’s the matter with you?’”

  Slaughter’s article came out when I was seven months pregnant with my first child. The subhead summarized her point: “It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.”

  As I read it, with growing trepidation, I began to doubt my ability to succeed as a working mom. Slaughter had quit a high-profile, demanding job in the State Department (under Hillary Clinton) because her family needed her. Maybe, I thought, I would have to quit my job too. That night, I went to bed and cried myself to sleep, even though crying is the worst thing you can do when you’re going to be on television the next day.

  In the morning, I re-watched Sandberg’s TED talk and her commencement addresses at Barnard College and Harvard Business School. I took notes. Then I mustered up the courage to email her. Though I’d reported on Sandberg’s work at Facebook, we had never met in person and she might have had no idea who I was, but for some reason I felt compelled to thank her for putting herself out there on this sadly controversial subject. I had no idea at the time that she was busy writing Lean In, a book that would become an international phenomenon.

  I gasped aloud when, thirty seconds later, Sandberg’s reply hit my in-box. She offered her congratulations on my pregnancy and gave me her cell-phone number in case I ever wanted to talk. Three weeks later, Sandberg and I connected and she shared many of her thoughts on work and family now chronicled in Lean In. I even got a taste of the “radical candor” that Kim Scott had experienced with Sandberg at Google. I never really came close to quitting my job, but my conversation with Sandberg gave me the motivation and confidence I needed to stop questioning myself so much. She made me truly believe that not only was it okay to want to be a working mom, it was actually possible to do a good job at both work and home.

  By the time I called on Sandberg again to ask for an interview for this book, Lean In had become an international bestseller. Thousands of “Lean In circles” had sprouted around the world, where women would gather to share their stories. But the book also created a cottage industry for writers—virtually
all of them women—to critique the advice Sandberg was offering. “Why I Hate Sheryl Sandberg,” “The False Promise of Sheryl Sandberg’s Theory of Change,” and “Why I Won’t Lean In” were just a few of the headlines in prominent newspapers and journals. Many of the writers proclaimed that Sandberg, a billionaire, simply couldn’t understand the plight of regular moms who are struggling to get food on the table. Some writers targeted both Sandberg and Mayer simultaneously, as in Joanne Bamberger’s 2013 USA Today column “The New Mommy Wars”: “Mayer and Sandberg, even if they have good intentions, are setting back the cause of working mothers.”

  A front page New York Times article quoted a female business consultant who said that Sandberg was “blaming other women for not trying hard enough,” and New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that Sandberg “has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.” The Lean In backlash became so powerful that many commentators were happy to criticize the book while openly admitting that they hadn’t read it.

  It was the mother of all pile ons. And, in my view, undeserved. Sandberg acknowledges that not every woman wants what she wants; in the book, she stipulates that many women are not looking to juggle a family and a career or ascend the corporate ranks. She was speaking to the women who wanted to succeed at both. As one of them, I can say she inspired me: I now go out of my way to give other moms the same pep talk when they feel the same self-doubt. Sandberg made me realize how powerful women can be when we help each other.