Today, Explained - The “Lean In” era is over

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Execs like YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki and Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg paved the way for women in tech. Now they’re leaving the industry — and being replaced by men. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited and fact-checked by Matt Collette with additional fact help from Victoria Chamberlin, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that Meta is going to lay off around 10,000 people and will not fill 5,000 open positions in a quest to make 2023, his words, a year of efficiency. It's a year of Meta, mean there are currently no women leading big tech companies. Big tech defined as MANG or Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. What is going on here? Susan Wojcicki was at Google since Google was in a garage. It was her garage. And Sheryl...

Do not lean back. Lean in. Sandberg? She wrote the book and the TED Talk on women leaders in tech. Coming up on Today Explained as Silicon Valley cuts jobs, is the era of lean in finally over? The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs?

And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. And we're going to start with the story of YouTube's former CEO, Susan Wojcicki. Peter Kafka is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers media and technology.

And so he knows Susan Wojcicki. He's been covering her for years now, beginning with her earliest days at Google. Susan Wojcicki's history with Google goes back to its founding. She famously rented out the garage of her Silicon Valley house to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. You know, the idea of people starting a company in a garage in Silicon Valley is a cliche and usually isn't true, but this one is true. I bought a house and houses are really expensive in Silicon Valley and I was a student. And so I wanted someone to help me pay the mortgage. And she joined a year later after renting out the garage, became the 16th employee at Google. If you don't think about how big Google is and how much money the people who started at Google made,

you can both understand that she's made a lot of money in her career and also that she's had a lot of influence at that company if she's there at the start. You were Google's 16th employee, first marketing manager. You worked on Google Doodles, Google Images, Google Books. You built the ad business. How many hats have you worn in 18 years? You know, I think when you join a startup, you just sort of have to be willing to do whatever the startup needs you to do. So Google's main money machine is something called AdWords.

That's when you go and type a query into Google and it spits out results. People are bidding on those results. She didn't create that, but she built out a significant chunk of the rest of Google's ads business, display ads. When you go to another website that isn't Google, you see an ad served up by Google. She built that out in large part. It's a huge business. From 2015 until 2021, every second dollar spent on online ads was spent on Google and Meta. Google earned $209 billion in ad revenue in 2021 alone,

making it the largest advertising company in the world. In 2014, she became CEO of YouTube. And at the time it was a big business. It was probably about a $5 billion business, but it still was a sidelight for Google. And it wasn't really clear how YouTube fit into Google. They'd bought it a decade earlier, not quite, for $1.65 billion. It's a huge thing in the internet, a huge thing in video. It wasn't quite clear how seriously Google took it. And I think by moving her in there, because she was a respected executive at the time, that was them saying, we think this business can get a lot bigger. We think it'd be good to be run by someone with real

business and advertising experience. And she was that person. Why was she so good at it? Like, what did she do exactly? There's a couple different things. First of all, the guy who'd run YouTube before Susan Wojcicki had been, I think, the ninth employee at Google. And he is a classic Googler. He is an engineer by trade, classically not a glad hander, didn't really want to look at you, would rather look at a laptop. I had that experience a few times. Just not someone that is going to spend a lot of time interfacing with people who buy and sell advertising, people who create videos and upload them to YouTube. Not that guy. Susan Wojcicki, by Hollywood or New York media standards, also not a dazzling, sparkling personality.

But by Google standards, she's a pretty media-savvy person and is happy or at least willing to go talk to advertisers, to go to New York and talk to publishers, and crucially to be the face of YouTube to its creators, which became an increasingly important role. Good evening, Bitcoin. It is great to be here and to see everyone. What kinds of policies did she institute at YouTube? So the main thing she had to do was sort of handle YouTube, which is this really unruly beast. Anyone can upload a video to YouTube. And early in YouTube's career, they made an important policy decision which said, look, if you upload video to YouTube and we sell advertising against

it, we're going to give you about half that money. It was a big deal. It remains a big deal. YouTube is still really the only company that allows creators to do that directly, which is why a lot of creators still are making stuff for YouTube instead of TikTok or Instagram, even though those sites may be buzzier or have more reach in certain places. Creators who were never going to make money some other ways are suddenly dependent on YouTube. And it's sort of a bleak algorithm to figure out whether they're making money or not. And then people start abusing YouTube too. Happens with any platform of any size on the internet. If you can upload stuff, people are going to upload unpleasant stuff. It created something called the adpocalypse in 2017, 2018.

Some inflammatory articles are posted about how major brands are being advertised on top of very vile YouTube videos. A bunch of advertisers fearing backlash removed their ads entirely from YouTube. And during this period, every YouTuber saw a decrease in revenue. In that case, it was a big enough furor that advertisers boycotted YouTube temporarily, and she had to negotiate all of that as well. I think the creator community sometimes doesn't understand some of the fragility with the advertisers. And we've been working really, really hard to bring back all of our advertisers after brand safety

and make sure they feel confident and keep spending. What do you think her legacy is going to be? I mean, to put it in business terms, that's the ones that I'm in some ways most comfortable talking about. It's probably a $5 billion business when she took it over, and it's a $29 billion business now. It's a big enough business that Google, and this is for accounting nerds, breaks out the business when it talks to Wall Street and says, this is a big, important part of our business. This is 10% of our business. That didn't happen for a long time, but it's something now that when it wants to tell Wall Street, this is how well we're doing, they'll point to YouTube

and the growth they're doing there. And again, it's easy to dismiss YouTube or ignore it, especially if you're an older person who isn't spending a lot of time on the internet. It's incredibly important culturally. I think it's really overlooked by a lot of people. It's the biggest video site in the world. It's the second largest search engine in the, overlooked by a lot of people. It's the biggest video site in the world. It's the second largest search engine in the world. For a lot of people, YouTube is the internet. And Susan Wojcicki ran YouTube for nine years. Why is she stepping away?

She put out a memo to the staff, which was then obviously then reproduced around the world. Said she's leaving for family, health, and personal projects. Two of those words are sort of standard when people leave a company and go on to do something else. Generally, they don't mention health. So you can draw an inference from that if you want. Beyond that, I don't know. Okay, so who's going to replace her? Who is this woman who's replacing her?

It's a man. No. Peter. I'm sorry. I'm kidding. Go ahead. Who is this fellow? This fellow is named Neil Mohan. It's great to be back at VidCon to celebrate its 10th anniversary with all of you here.

Think of him as the vice president to Susan Wojcicki's president. They have a long, long relationship. Neil Mohan helped build that ad business with Susan Wojcicki at Google. And about a year after she came to run YouTube, she brought him on and it's basically her number two. Like Susan Wojcicki, this is someone who's comfortable with the advertising and media part of the business, which is crucial.

Everything we do is aimed at lifting up our creators and helping them achieve their dreams. We want to spark opportunity in a way only YouTube can. How big a moment is Susan Wojcicki's departure for this company? You never know, but it's hard to imagine that Neil Mohan is going to run the business in a significantly different way than Susan Wojcicki did. But, you know, she's one of the very few women in leadership in Silicon Valley. And I think the significance of her leaving in that context, if you look,

is that there are so few women in positions of power in tech that when Susan Wojcicki leaves, their ranks get significantly smaller. If you have a club and there's only three or four people in it and one leaves, that club is a lot smaller. We've dealt with this all the time when we had conferences over at Recode and all things digital. You know, you could get Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook to show up. Do not lean back. Lean in. And you get Susan Wojcicki to show up from YouTube.

And there weren't a lot of other women you could get on stage that had significant equivalent positions of power. Now both those women no longer work at those companies. Is there something broader happening in the tech industry? I mean, you named two women there. Is there a larger trend where women are pulling back? I think the thing to ask is why aren't there more women available to succeed a Sheryl Sandberg or a Susan Wojcicki? That's an open question. We are going to try to answer that open question ahead on Today Explained.

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Do not lean back. Lean in. It's Today Explained. We're back. Naomi Nix is a reporter for The Washington Post. Naomi covers social media companies. And lately, as you might expect, she's been covering layoffs at social media companies. She's gathered some data that shows those layoffs are hitting women and people of color harder than they are men and white employees. Okay, so earlier in the show, Peter was telling us that it's not like we've seen dozens of women leave top jobs in tech, because there are not dozens of women in top jobs in tech. There are just a few. After Marissa Mayer left her post as CEO of Yahoo in 2017, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Sheryl Sandberg at Meta were the two big names in big tech, capital B, capital T, just a handful

of companies. All three of them, you know, had really built their early careers and their early success in the late 1990s and early 20s as they got started at Google. They were able to sort of build these early careers, you know, with Sheryl in online advertising and sales. Marissa was a top product person at Google. And Susan obviously sort of worked her way up to the top of YouTube. And now that generation is largely, you know, has left. Naomi says as leaders, Wojcicki and Sandberg had some things in common, but ultimately they used their power and influence differently. They were similar in that they were running similar types of businesses. And they both ran companies at a time in which there really was a sort of sea change politically for social media in general. And they both kind of had to take on this other role of being

the face of how the company was handling some of these thorny public policy issues like misinformation and political polarization. And I am so sorry that we let so many people down. But Cheryl took on a kind of bolder, higher profile role in terms of championing women. So she, you know, essentially pushed into the forefront her lean-in philosophy. It was a kind of brand of corporate feminism, which encouraged women to consider getting more ambitious and to raise your hand at new opportunities, even in your personal life, in your dating life. Like, evaluate, like, is this person going to help your career? Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough

motivation for everyone out there, they also have more, how shall I say this on this stage, they know each other more in the biblical sense as well. And that brand of sort of corporate feminism, you know, turned into a book. It turned into a nonprofit. She did a famous TED Talk. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did,

if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. There was some backlash to that, right? Like, very early on, there were critiques. People said she left out women of color and the sort of unique pressures that women of color face. There was also criticism that she put too much onus on individual women and not enough on the system. But still, you know, that brand of feminism, it affected how she talked about, you know, Facebook's policies. We offer benefits for all life stages and really generous benefits. We don't just try to follow the market. We try to follow our employees. So we offer,

you know, four months of maternity and paternity leave. You can take it anytime in the first year. We give you cash when you have a baby, whether you adopt or you give birth. And she envisioned them as something that would encourage other companies to adopt friendlier workplace policies in order to be more inclusive to women. We talk about these women leaving their jobs. Notably, they're not getting fired. They're not passing away in the CEO chair. They are quitting. What are the reasons they're giving, and do you see similarities there? So in the case of Susan and Cheryl, they both stated they want to spend more time with their family. Susan also mentioned there were some health reasons at play. I think it's notable, though, that in all three cases, really, even if we're sort of including Marissa, that they left their businesses at a time when there was a lot of duress on the business itself. Meta is cutting about 13% of its workforce in the largest wave of layoffs in the tech giant's history.

If you look at Google, YouTube has made its first quarterly decline in advertising revenue in its whole existence. They're both grappling with these really unprecedented market pressures. And they left, right? They left in a moment when the business was weaker than it had been in a very, very long time. And while they weren't formally or publicly pushed out, it does sort of raise questions about, are there unique pressures on top female executives when the economic going gets tough. When you talk to your sources in the tech world, is there a sense that women cannot win in tech? Or has that time period passed?

People definitely still raise questions about the pressures facing women in technology. I mean, these places are very male-dominated, and women are often relegated to roles that aren't seen as economically important, which means ultimately their work, by and large, isn't valued. For instance, during the pandemic, actually, many of the companies, A, started offering more generous, flexible work arrangements that allowed them to recruit more women and people of color. As we consider remote work, right, which has been accelerated through this crisis, we're looking at what are the opportunities now to have people working in cities where we didn't have offices before, but which could increase our diversity. Because one of the issues is that, you know, Silicon Valley is not very diverse. You saw like Facebook and Twitter actively actually say they have had more success in diversity during the pandemic because they could recruit outside Silicon Valley. What we know is that works to increase representation. So for instance, since we've done it, we've

increased the number of Black women we've hired by 40x. So now you have this like new crop of women and people of color entering these companies with a lot of hope and optimism about the kind of career that they can build. But then when the going gets tough and the tech companies decide to lay people off, you know, the initial evidence suggests that they're laying off the people who are newer to the company, last in, first out, which research suggests hurts diversity. And they're laying off people who occupy particular roles that they consider less necessary. They're your human resources managers, your marketers, people outside the core sort of engineering tech-focused roles. And that means women, and that means people of color.

Are there other women in tech who are replacing Sheryl Sandberg in that role of, like, ensuring that the pipeline problems are acknowledged, ensuring that the pipeline remains open? Who do we look to now? There's no next Cheryl. There's no one, I think, that has taken on that mantle with such public force. I mean, it's really taking the risk to their personal profiles by talking about it, right? Because when they're judged on Wall Street, they're not being judged on diversity. I don't know that Sheryl's message, as it currently stands, would have the same reception now that it did back then. Because the economic and political situations have changed. When companies are laying off thousands of their workers, being told that you just have to work harder to obtain power at these companies, it's not going to work. A message of you just need to raise your hand a little higher

isn't necessarily going to translate, right? And I think we even saw this internally, after some of these leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, started to offer messages about how essentially the boon times are over. Zuckerberg calling the current downturn the worst he's seen in recent history. The company is, quote, turning up the heat on existing staff unable to meet more aggressive goals. Zuckerberg telling his employees, quote, realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here. Employees at some of these companies were kind of like, hey, we've been working hard and we've been working hard during a pandemic. And that was actually a really difficult thing. And being told as women who are juggling taking care of their

kids and loved ones while working from home and are trying to keep all the balls in the air. Like they don't want to be told that the problem is them when there's so clearly other barriers at work. In terms of potential bright spots, I mean, look, there's still women leaders. Safra Katz is the CEO of Oracle, a big software company that's, you know, maybe less well-known to everyday people, but is actually still a pretty big tech company. I think V Popos, the chief operating officer of TikTok, is actually perhaps one of the more interesting leaders in the technology industry right now. V recently came out as non-binary. And when they did, they took the moment to say that they wanted

to bring their whole self to the role. And so I think it would be really interesting if we were to see more from them about the need to champion diversity in the workplace. Let me ask you lastly about the stakes here. We know that these tech companies are now laser focused on things like artificial intelligence, the metaverse. What could a lack of women at the top or even at the start of the pipeline mean for the products that these companies build and these products that we use? I mean, it's a well-known fact that women are more likely to suffer harassment on certain social media sites. If there aren't people who care about that, working on policies and new product interventions to protect people who are facing harassment, then ultimately large swaths of the population suffer the consequences. A new report from Amnesty International says Twitter is not respecting the rights of women.

The report says women are often threatened on Twitter, and that even though the company's policies prohibit abuse, the social media platform is not providing, quote, adequate remedies for the victims of those threats. You know, artificial intelligence, and particularly generative AI that companies are focused on right now, there's already been reports about the potential for racism and bigotry and bias to come through in some of these new products. One UC Berkeley professor was able to trick chat GPT to write a piece of code to check if someone would be a good scientist based on their race and gender.

A good scientist, it found, was white and male. If there aren't people who care about those issues as they're being developed and generated, it's going to be a harder road to make sure that those services are treating people equally. The other thing I would just highlight is economic opportunity. The wealth gap still exists. And tech companies are, look, they have high salaries. They are a way to get a piece of a very still lucrative pie. And if women and people of color are shut out of those opportunities, that's just one less place they get to go to help advance their economic empowerment.

Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlain. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.