Wojcicki is leaving to spend more time with her family and focus on her health and personal projects, according to a letter she sent to employees that was posted on YouTube’s corporate blog. She has spent time in the past months away from the office for health reasons, said a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. She will be replaced by Neal Mohan, YouTube’s head of product, who first came to Google through the company’s acquisition of advertising tech platform DoubleClick in 2008.
With Mohan taking over, the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, Snap, Netflix, Disney and YouTube are now all men.
“It’s always such a big impact when somebody who is a woman at such a high-profile position leaves,” said Sheryl Daija, CEO and founder of Bridge, an organization that represents diversity, equity and inclusion leaders. “As we lose women leaders, we also risk losing the next generation of women. As we lose leaders that are people of color, we then risk losing the next generation of people of color. So there’s this domino effect.”
Wojcicki’s departure is a major changing of the guard for Google. It was in Wojcicki’s Silicon Valley garage that Larry Page and Sergey Brin began building the search giant. Brin later married her sister, and Wojcicki stayed with the company, rising through the ranks and holding a number of major roles before being appointed head of YouTube in 2014.
Wojcicki was seen by many Google employees as more or less a member of Brin and Page’s family, given her long relationship with them and status as one of the company’s founding employees. Her name was floated by some as a potential future CEO of Google.
Instead, many high-profile women in tech have stepped down from their roles before becoming CEO. Wojcicki’s departure follows other high-profile female leaders who have left big technology companies. Earlier this week, Meta Chief Business Officer Marne Levine announced she would be leaving after 13 years at the company. Last year, Sheryl Sandberg announced she was stepping down as chief operating officer after a 14-year stint at the social media giant.
Those departures leave the ranks of women in the c-suite of major tech companies even thinner. Deborah Liu, a former Facebook executive, is the CEO of Ancestry.com, while Safra Catz is the CEO of software company Oracle.
The recent spate of job cuts in the tech sector has jeopardized the progress many major companies made in diversifying their workforces during the pandemic with the lure of remote work. Silicon Valley layoffs have hit women particularly hard, because they were newer to their jobs and occupied roles that companies were less interested in retaining, according to experts.
Attrition rates for people who work in roles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion have outpaced other roles at more than 600 U.S. companies that laid off workers since late 2020 — a disparity that grew worse in the past six months, according to data from Revelio Labs, a company that analyzes trends in the labor market.
“The [economic] uncertainty will mean workers who are already not quite your stereotypical tech bro might be more in jeopardy,” said Reyhan Ayas, a senior economist at Revelio Labs.
Wojcicki oversaw tremendous growth, taking YouTube from around a billion users about a decade ago to the over 2 billion people who use it monthly today. She also oversaw the expansion of YouTube’s Creator program and helped spearhead efforts to help creators monetize their work. During her tenure, YouTube was one of Google’s most important revenue growth drivers, going from $3.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018, when the company first broke out YouTube’s financial numbers, to nearly $8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022. Wall Street analysts sometimes pointed out, however, that YouTube’s revenue per user was significantly lower than such competitors as Facebook.
Over the years, Wojcicki also faced scrutiny over how YouTube handled problematic content. During her tenure, activists and regulators around the world criticized the company for allowing hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories. Even before the pandemic, anti-vaccine influencers had grown popular on the platform, and the site had become a key part of the ecosystem of vaccine skeptics that exploded when the coronavirus began spreading.
The company has also faced the ire of civil rights groups and lawmakers over its lack of transparency about how the platform fights misinformation in languages other than English and the spread of election-misinformation on its social network. Last year, Wojcicki promised members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in a private meeting to offer more data about how misinformation in Spanish is moderated on the video-sharing network, according to the lawmakers.
“We’ve tried to engage with YouTube for years, in attempts to better understand how the platform moderates content and whether it applies its rules equitably across the globe and across languages,” Nora Benavidez, a senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at media and technology advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement. “The transition of leadership is a critical moment for YouTube to step up its game to prioritize engagement with the civil and human rights field.”
Wojcicki also made the decision, along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, to ban Donald Trump from YouTube after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. When Facebook said earlier this year that it would rescind its ban on Trump, the focus swung to whether YouTube would do the same. YouTube’s ban remains, for now.
Taylor Lorenz contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly said that the garage rented by Google’s founders was located at the house of Wojcicki’s parents. It was located at her house. The article has been corrected.
