End of an era? Silicon Valley loses generation of female tech leaders

When Susan Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube in 2014, she was in relatively good company as a female leader in Silicon Valley.

Marissa Mayer, his former colleague at Google, ran Yahoo and posed for magazine covers.

Sheryl Sandberg was the second most influential person at the helm of Facebook, which had just published a bestselling book on corporate feminism.

Former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman was at the helm of HP, and Ginni Rometty was the first woman to lead IBM.

Wojcicki’s announcement last week that she is stepping down from her leadership role at YouTube marks the end of an era.

The tech industry has already lost an entire generation of pioneering female leaders and replaced them mostly with men.

“It’s almost like we have to start from scratch,” said Sheryl Daija, founder of Bridge, an advocacy group made up of dozens of diversity, equity and inclusion business leaders.

The tech sector has long lagged behind other industries when it comes to the representation of women in leadership roles.

And in the wake of the pandemic, women leaders in corporate America overall are more likely than ever to give up, according to the latest Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org.

Just days before Wojcicki’s announcement, Meta business director Marne Levine also said she would be leaving the company after 13 years.

None of the Big Five US tech companies — Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft — has ever had a woman as CEO, and Wojcicki’s chief executive title at Alphabet’s subsidiary YouTube perhaps puts her closer.

Now that she’s leaving, big tech is facing a new reckoning over its failure to promote and support women leaders, and what that could mean for the next generation of women in the industry.

In Silicon Valley men’s club, women ‘have to fight a little harder’

As a woman in Silicon Valley, “it’s fair to say that you have to fight a little harder,” said Sima Sistani, co-founder and former CEO of the app Houseparty, who held leadership roles at Epic Games, Yahoo and Tumblr before becoming CEO of Weight Watchers last year.

“Having a network of other women was critical to my success,” Sistani said. “And I give a lot of credit to the women who helped support and also pave the way forward.”

Sistani is not alone in women’s uphill battle in the face of technology. Silicon Valley has long been criticized for its male-dominated “brother culture”.

Francoise Brougher, Pinterest’s former chief operating officer, sued the social media platform for gender discrimination and retaliation in 2020, arguing in court documents, that she was fired after reporting “humiliating sexist comments” by another executive at the company.

Pinterest settled the lawsuit later that year, but the legal battle was seen as yet another example in a series of incidents that highlight how even the most powerful women in tech are treated.

There are still a handful of women, albeit lesser-known ones, in tech’s upper echelon, including Meta CFO Susan Li, Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker AMD.

Meanwhile, some well-known women in tech, like Vijaya Gadde, the former chief legal, policy and trust officer at Twitter, have become targets of vicious online harassment campaigns.

Laura Kray, a professor of leadership at the University of California, Berkeley, said that with Wojcicki’s departure from YouTube, “it’s hard to see the latest departure of a top female leader as anything other than further evidence that the industry technology industry has not realized its stated aspirations of creating inclusive cultures capable of attracting and retaining the best talent.”

Driving change for the future

Now at the helm of Weight Watchers, Sistani brings her digital expertise to the company, as well as her expertise as a female leader in the workplace.

Late last year, Sistani, a mother of two, expanded Weight Watchers’ paid parental leave policy, a move she saw as crucial to creating equal opportunities for all parents at the company.

Kray, who is also director of the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership at Berkeley, said having women in leadership roles is crucial as it provides role models for budding women and opportunities to mentor “leaders who may have faced similar challenges as rise through the ranks.”

This representation at the top is critical for women in middle management, the point at which women tend to see their highest career aspirations fulfilled or thwarted.

“Without women at the helm who came before them, this could make this transition period more difficult for the next generation of women leaders,” said Kray.

Daija of the Bridge organization added that one lesson from this exodus of women tech leaders is the importance of succession planning, to ensure that when a female CEO steps down, other female CEOs are ready to continue her progress.

“When roles are replaced by the same representativeness we already have, we don’t lose space, we maintain and build”, he said.

Wojcicki will be succeeded by Neal Mohan, a 15-year-old Google vet who was most recently chief product officer at YouTube.

While Sistani said it might feel like “we’ve taken a step back” with so many top women in tech stepping away, she added, “I think it’s important for us to also look for the places where things are working. ”

She pointed to the fact that female CEOs now run more than 10% of Fortune 500 companies for the first time in history.

“Instead of being discouraged at these times, we can think of the great example that someone like Susan [Wojcicki] it’s working,” added Sistani.

“I think what she achieved and what she modeled will be something that will live on beyond the fact that we now don’t have a female CEO of Big Tech.”