“Let me tell you what I think is the right step for the future.” Those words, suggested by YouTube Chief Executive Officer Susan Wojcicki as a way for women to immediately call out those speaking over or ignoring them in meetings, serve as more than a pushback against workplace disrespect—they stand as a rallying cry in the fight for equality. From serving as a foundational contributor to the technology industry to pushing to make it more inclusive for women, she has been unafraid to demand anything less than the respect she deserves - and she works hard to ensure that others can follow in her footsteps.
Born on July 5, 1968 Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus in California, where her father was a physics professor. She had an early start in entrepreneurship, starting a door-to-door sales business at age 11 and writing for her high school newspaper. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class in her senior year, graduating with honors from Harvard University in 1990 and going on to receive her Master of Science degree and a Master of Business Administration degree before working in marketing at Intel and serving as a management consultant at Bain & Company.
Her involvement with Google came in its early days as she and her husband rented out their garage to the young company in 1998, later coming aboard as the company’s sixteenth employee after seeing the new search engine’s potential. That vision paid off as her contributions touched on everything from viral marketing campaigns to projects such as Google Doodles, Images, and Books. Becoming the senior vice president of advertising & commerce, she oversaw the company’s acquisition and development of AdSense, AdWords, Google Analytics, and DoubleClick.
Wojcicki’s vision of the future served her and the company again as she saw YouTube, then a small startup, outperforming Google Video’s service. In response, she proposed its purchase, eventually handling two of the company’s largest acquisitions in 2006 and 2007 - YouTube and DoubleClick, with a combined value of $4.75 billion. In 2014 she rose to become the CEO of YouTube, driving its explosive development and growth to billions of users spread out over 100 countries around the world, in 80 different languages.
As a major leader in the technology industry, Wojcicki has also served as an advocate for equality for women. Her efforts to make the industry more inclusive have included expanding paid maternity leave, increasing the number of female staffers at YouTube from a quarter to a third of all employees, and pushing tech companies to do all they can to recruit, retain, and promote women with tech degrees. She made her priorities clear in an interview with Forbes, saying “It has to come from the top. You have to have the leader say this is important, and it’s the right thing for the company—and really mean it.”