Tech Could Use More Susan Wojcickis

(Bloomberg Opinion/Beth Kowitt) — As the CEO of Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube, Susan Wojcicki was no stranger to controversy. She once said that trying to manage a platform struggling with misinformation and vile behavior meant that "everybody is angry at you all the time."

But after learning that she had died last week at age 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer, the firestorm I keep coming back to had nothing to do with the business she ran. It took place during a period in 2015 when interviewers at tech conferences couldn't seem to stop asking Wojcicki about her kids. The CEO had five of them, and inquiring minds wanted to know how she managed both a high-powered career as well as her family. It's the eternal question asked of successful women: How do you do it all?

The uproar that followed focused on the fact that male CEOs rarely, if ever, get probed about work-life balance, and that queries about motherhood undermine a woman's professional accomplishments when posed in a business context. "Implicit in the question to a woman of how do you do that is, well, it's your job to be at home taking care of kids and you obviously aren't doing that right now because you're at work doing something else," Wojcicki explained at the time, "so who is doing what we thought was your job?"

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It wouldn't be the first or last time that Wojcicki would get painted as a maternal figure despite all she had achieved in her career. I've written before about how powerful women in Silicon Valley are often labeled as the adult in the room, and Wojcicki was no exception. She had been called "nonthreatening," the "most measured person in tech," "exceedingly normal, bordering on boring," "less a visionary thinker than an open-minded and analytical one," and the "mother of Google." There's nothing wrong with any of it — except of course within the context of Silicon Valley, where the implication was that she lacked the bravado of her male counterparts. This framing also manages to gloss over Wojcicki's risk-taking both in her personal and professional life. She left a stable job to join Google as its 16th employee when she was pregnant with her first child and the company had yet to make a dime. And once there, she pushed for Google to gamble on massive acquisitions like DoubleClick and YouTube.

The fixation on casting Wojcicki as the tech world's normie mom has always been a superficial and convenient attempt to explain how she was different from the archetype of the successful (male) Silicon Valley tech executive. She preferred not to be in the spotlight, and she wasn't showy. She described her management style as "supportive" — a direct contrast to the toxic tech bro culture that has come to dominate. And she was willing to talk about her family, which many successful women of the same era feared would be a career killer. She was the first woman at Google to take maternity leave and didn't shy away from making the business case for having strong paid leave policies — something she advocated for within her own company and corporate America more broadly. By leading in her own way, she opened the door not just for women in the industry but for everyone who didn't look or behave like the tech world's vaunted founder class.

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Wojcicki thought about her legacy in part through the eyes of her kids, once saying, "If someone were to look back on the decisions that we're making, would they feel we were on the right side of history? Would I feel proud? Will my children feel like I made good decisions?"

Thinking about the impact you'll have on coming generations is not about being maternal. It's simply about being human, and Wojcicki seemed to know innately how important that mindset was to the future of her industry. It's something Silicon Valley could use a lot more of these days.