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  Google’s women leaders worked within that culture but seemed to walk a different line from other managers. “Susan was very supportive,” Scott remembers of Wojcicki. “But she would tell you exactly what she thought, tell you when you screwed up, and also did a lot of things that made it safe to try something new.”

  For her part, Sandberg worked to build camaraderie among Google’s female employees by kicking off a series of women’s networking events, some at the office and some at her home, where she would invite powerful women and men to speak. She also went to great lengths to mentor women in the workplace.

  Men also appreciated her management style. “Sheryl had, besides one of the strongest hands, one of the kindest and gentlest,” says David DiNucci, one of the first employees on the AdWords team. “Her emotional IQ is off the charts; she knew which people needed a kick in the butt or a pat on the head.”

  Scott recalls that Sandberg pulled her aside after a presentation. After complimenting her on the positives, Sandberg said, “I noticed you said ‘um’ a lot. Were you aware of it?” Scott was not, but she shrugged off the comment. “I can tell I’m not really getting through to you,” Sandberg then said. “When you say ‘um,’ it makes you sound stupid, and you won’t succeed at Google if people think you’re stupid.”

  Although chastened, Scott was appreciative. “It was like I had been walking around with spinach in my teeth my whole career and no one had told me,” she says. Scott went on to teach management at Apple and developed an entire management philosophy and consulting business based largely on her experiences at Google, which she describes in her book, Radical Candor.

  TRYING TO IMPLEMENT DIVERSITY

  As Google grew before and after the IPO, it was desperately in need of qualified engineers. Yet its leaders still aimed to put some focus on hiring women, using a number of unique approaches. For example, each week the company meticulously tracked the percentage of its women engineers. Page noticed that the engineering ranks were filling up with men and pressed his recruiters on why they weren’t hiring more women. The team responded by saying that qualified women were hard to find. Not satisfied with that answer, Page insisted he would keep asking until the recruiters found more women. At one point, a recruiter remembers Page ordering the team to stop hiring male engineers until they had hired twenty female engineers in a row.

  “They would take disproportionate amounts of recruiters and have them just focus on female hiring,” says former Google engineering manager Niniane Wang, who served on the hiring committee for several years. “Recruiters would get upset and feel they were being made to do a harder job,” she says. “Finding men was easy. The founders did something really hard and caused grumbling within the recruiting organization in order to achieve this greater goal.”

  Still, recruiters couldn’t source women candidates fast enough. Page voiced impatient disapproval over the lack of progress at a company meeting. “I’m not seeing any movement,” one recruiter recalls Page saying. “This is terrible. What are you guys doing?” Page and Brin started kicking around the idea of starting their own school in an attempt to build a gender-balanced pipeline.

  “They were very focused,” says Sandberg of Page and Brin. “They just cared very much about hiring more female engineers. It wasn’t perfect, but no company is.”

  Wojcicki believes one of the best things about Google’s recruiting is that no hiring decision is ever made by only one person. “I think the thing about Google’s hiring process is that it’s much more committee based,” Wojcicki says. “So, let’s say you have a bad interview with one person; well, you have a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance. And so that gives you a better view of that candidate for us from a company standpoint, but I also think it gives that candidate more chances as well.”

  Mayer went out of her way to back female candidates she believed in. When she interviewed a young aspiring product manager named Laura Holmes, Mayer was impressed. There was only one problem. Google preferred to hire top students from elite schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and, of course, Stanford. Holmes had gone to Stanford but earned only average grades and then dropped out, with just three classes left to complete. “I found CS late, I ran out of money, and I planned it so I could finish my degree in my spare time at community college,” Holmes tells me. Google didn’t outright reject her. Instead, Holmes says her case was brought before Google’s hiring committee multiple times. “The feedback I was getting was ‘You seem great; we just don’t understand why you didn’t graduate,’” she says. Mayer not only encouraged Google to hire Holmes; she saw to it that Holmes received a signing bonus so she could finish her Stanford degree.

  Around 2008, Google also established a secret hiring practice to ensure that women engineers did not fall through the cracks. “If a woman failed an interview, a second committee was assigned to review the case,” a former Google executive tells me. It was called the Revisit Committee, and it included women engineers who would take a closer look at candidates on the verge of being denied. Eventually, the Revisit Committee started to assess the cases not just of women but of all diverse candidates, and sometimes those applicants would be hired after all. This measure was taken specifically to respond to concerns about unconscious bias in the hiring process, but it was not publicized within the company, to avoid making women feel as if they were getting special treatment and to minimize criticism about “lowering the bar.”

  Google implemented strict rules stipulating that you could not talk to fellow employees about the interviews you conducted, so as not to sway their opinion or taint the process. One day, Mayer interviewed a fairly senior man in the tech industry. “He was really rude to me,” she recalls. “I don’t know if it’s because I was young or because I was a woman, but I felt it was a little bit of both.” After the interview, she sat on a couch and tried to put her thoughts in writing (all Google interviews are documented in detail) but found herself struggling to find the right words to describe what exactly rubbed her the wrong way.

  A female colleague sat down next to her, and Mayer confessed she had just come out of a tough interview. Her colleague responded, “You know, I had a tough one today too.” They realized they were both talking about the same man and decided to raise the issue with Brin. First they had to explain why they broke the rules by comparing notes; then they tried to describe why they felt this particular candidate might be sexist. “It seems like there could be a gender issue there, and we know how important gender is to you,” Mayer recalls saying. Brin suggested having a third female engineer speak to the candidate, and she came back with the same mixed report. Google ultimately passed on the candidate. Mayer says, “It validated that Sergey wasn’t going to hire someone who made us feel mistreated.”

  According to Mayer, Brin later asked her, “‘How do we know this isn’t happening every day on the interviews you’re not on? We could be hiring guys that are going to make you feel mistreated.’” Google then established a policy that all technical candidates had to be interviewed by at least one woman and that the report had to cover not only technical skills but “cultural sensitivities” as well.

  Giving women input into all hires carried a downside that Brin was quick to point out. “This means you are going to end up doing a lot more interviews than anyone else,” Mayer remembers him saying. “But it’s important enough to us that we want to build a strong team.” He was right: In return for having a hiring voice, the women had to add these responsibilities to their full-time jobs. Some women felt that participating in so many interviews hurt their performance overall. The more time they spent doing interviews, the less time they spent writing code, which is what reviews and raises were based on. But many women felt obliged to make themselves available anyway, because if they didn’t, hiring would slow down. These time-consuming measures would be hard to scale as Google grew. Niniane Wang says she received many panicked calls from recruiters because the fema
le interviewer suddenly had to cancel, and they needed someone to take her place.

  • • •

  THE REVISIT COMMITTEE NO longer exists as a diversity initiative at Google, but it is far from the only proactive measure the company has taken. Google offers scholarships and internships and runs a summer institute, all reserved for women and other underrepresented groups. The company also conducts research on why young women do and do not choose tech as a career and provides unconscious-bias training to its employees. In 2014, Google launched Made with Code, a $50 million campaign to inspire girls to embrace computer science.

  Despite it all, Google struggled not only to get women into the company but also to move them into leadership roles. The search engine battled disgruntlement among employees who believed that Google, with all of these diversity measures, was compromising its rightfully high standards for a seat on the rocket ship. Nancy Lee, who started her career as a lawyer at Google, then became vice president of people operations until retiring in 2017, says the “elitist aspect” of Google’s hiring process became especially problematic. “A lot of people thought it was incumbent on them to find a reason not to hire someone. This is such an exclusive club that we need to poke and prod a person in such a way as to find any weakness, because so many people want to work here. But that gets a little crazy and you start dinging people for silly things,” Lee explains. “I think it hurts women and minorities more because there is a component of unconscious bias, but even absent of that, you have people looking for an affinity and people like them who come from the same backgrounds and can relate to them, instead of the core competencies of the job.”

  The meritocracy ideal that had started with companies like Trilogy, and was perpetuated by PayPal, was impossible to escape. Yet stereotypes about who made good tech employees (nerds and bros) were pervasive, limiting, and biased in favor of men. Two conflicting narratives developed within the organization. Some believed Google should strive only to be a perfect meritocracy. Others recognized that such an ideal was impossible to achieve in practice. “The underlying principle of meritocracy is that it works as long as your assessment of people is fair and unbiased,” Google’s former long-time head and senior vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock told me. “The reality is that without support or training nobody is completely fair and unbiased.”

  MIXED SIGNALS FROM THE TOP

  Even when the money started rolling in, Google—unlike, say, PayPal—never became a poster child for bro culture and the hostile-to-women environment that implies. But stories still circulate from the company’s early days of Googlers gone wild at raucous ski parties in Tahoe. Office romances and entanglements—including one between Mayer and Page—were tolerated, but no big scandals erupted publicly, at least in the first decade.

  As years went by, however, the top executives at Google became insanely rich, and there was increasingly noisy gossip about their love lives. A pattern emerged of executive interoffice relationships, which The Information (a subscription-only site that reports on the tech industry) referred to as “something out of a rebooted soap opera—Dynasty 2.0.” In 2007, then CEO Eric Schmidt apparently dated tech publicist Marcy Simon, while she was doing marketing work for Google. Then, in the long, hot summer of 2013, executive chairman Eric Schmidt was outed by the Daily Mail, a U.K. tabloid, as having had numerous extra marital affairs with younger women, including a female television personality who gave him the nickname “Dr. Strangelove.” Valleywag, a tech industry gossip blog, followed up with a story claiming that Schmidt’s New York apartment was a love nest that had been soundproofed.

  A month later, news broke that Brin, then forty, was having an affair with a junior employee on his Google Glass team named Amanda Rosenberg. To make matters more complicated, Rosenberg’s then-boyfriend, Hugo Barra, was a lead executive heading up Google’s Android division, who left at about the same time as the scandal broke in the press to run global operations at the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. And to make it even more complicated, Brin was married to Susan Wojcicki’s sister Anne, a Silicon Valley force in her own right, heading up the genetic-testing company 23andMe. Fast Company once called her “the most daring CEO in America.”

  Other sexcapades involving lesser-known but still powerful men at Google became part of company lore but took years to end up in the media. Longtime chief legal counsel David Drummond had an extramarital affair with a paralegal in his departent, Jennifer Blakely, and the pair had a child together. The Information reported that in order to address the conflict of interest, Google moved Blakely from the legal department to the sales department and she later left the company, while Drummond remained.

  It is hard to say just how the romantic intrigues of Google’s leadership affected the rank and file. Some employees have expressed disappointment and frustration at what they described as the hypocrisy of their bosses; the relationships were often secret and when they were exposed it was the women, not the men, who were reassigned. Others have argued that Google has been too permissive of interoffice dating in general, and created an environment that made it easier for employees to traverse dangerous territory. “If you give employees the license to date, the minute you have that license, there are always blurred lines,” one former employee told me.

  On the other hand, many current and former Googlers are happily married to each other. “Google intentionally tried to create a collegiate culture,” says former product manager Minnie Ingersoll, who dated a peer at Google for several years. “Any environment that encourages you to build relationships with your colleagues is going to lead to some romance. Trying to ban something like people falling in love would be both pointless and unfortunate. Of course, we’ve been seeing the perils of abused power dynamics lately . . . and we all need to have zero tolerance for that sort of behavior. Companies should have clear policies and then create structures that encourage and reward transparency . . . There were HR business partners that were there to help work through real-world individual situations.” In 2013, Google began requiring executives to alert higher-ups to relationships that might raise a conflict of interest.

  That said, it is a tricky proposition at companies where women are so vastly outnumbered. “Sexism happens anytime when you’re in the minority,” says former Google product lead Bindu Reddy. “Women become targets because men want to hit on them. There’s a lot of attention and that leads to unhealthy situations. This is why having a small percentage of women is really negative.”

  In 2015, former Google software engineer Kelly Ellis wrote a series of tweets in which she claimed she was sexually harassed by senior leaders at Google. Executives, she tweeted, made comments about her appearance, including one who said, “It’s taking all of my self-control not to grab your ass right now.” Google employee Rod Chavez, whom Ellis named as one of her harassers in a tweet, left the company that month. In the wake of Ellis’s allegations, and Schmidt’s and Brin’s affairs, the company dramatically reset the bar for what behavior would be tolerated. Google added new avenues for employees to file complaints, shared the numbers of complaints and disciplinary actions taken with the workforce, and started the Respect@ (pronounced “Respect at”) program, where executives discussed how to address inappropriate behavior at all levels of the organization. “Yes, at Google,” launched separately as a grassroots effort in 2016, was an email list where employees could anonymously submit allegations. “There was an acknowledgment that we needed to tighten it up at all levels of the food chain,” says Nancy Lee, referring to how Google handled the well-known dalliances of its top executives all the way up to Brin and Schmidt. “You probably don’t know and I probably don’t know when the ‘shake the shit out of [them]’ conversations happened, but they happened. There’s shame in that and they don’t want it to be their legacy. They think they are changing the world here, and they really are.”

  Still, the company didn’t always properly message how it dealt with ba
d behavior and, by some accounts, even rewarded it. Reports revealed that in 2014, Andy Rubin, the mastermind behind Google’s popular Android operating system, left after engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. At the time, Rubin said he left on his own accord, and Google subsequently invested in Rubin’s new tech incubator, Playground. In response to the later allegations, a spokesperson for Rubin said that any relationship he had was consensual and did not involve someone who reported to him. In 2016, longtime Google executive Amit Singhal was also permitted to leave gracefully with no mention of his bad behavior. Singhal announced that he would be moving on from Google to pursue philanthropy. It later emerged that he was forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment (which he denied). At the end of 2017, Eric Schmidt stepped down as executive chairman. No mention was made about his personal affairs, and he remained on the company’s board.

  In the meantime, Google continued with its multifronted effort to create a diverse workforce. But as the search engine grew to tens of thousands of employees, those efforts seemed to pay off less and less.

  SETTLING AT AVERAGE

  In 2017, Google reported numbers much like the rest of the industry’s, with women accounting for 31 percent of employees overall, 25 percent of leadership roles, and 20 percent of technical roles, a far cry from fifty-fifty. Despite years of good intentions and multiple company-wide policy changes and initiatives, Google merely settled at average among its Silicon Valley peers, and there was more bad news to come.

  That spring, Google’s reputation for how it treats women took a significant hit when the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it had clear evidence of “systemic compensation disparities” between male and female employees at the company after reviewing pay data of twenty-one thousand Googlers. “The department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women,” said Janet Herold, Regional Solicitor for the department. “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.” The following September, three former female Google employees, including Kelly Ellis, filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of paying women less than men for similar work but also putting them on lower-paying career paths. A spokeswoman for Google said, “Job levels and promotions are determined through rigorous hiring and promotion committees, and must pass multiple levels of review, including checks to make sure there is no gender bias in these decisions. And we have extensive systems in place to ensure that we pay fairly.”