Susan Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube this February at age 46 and is now eight months pregnant with her fifth child. When asked how she balances her Silicon Valley executive career and her family, her answer is simple: you can have both because your career can benefit your family and your family can benefit your career.
“Your kids get something from your career and your career will get something from your kids,” she told Today this week.
How does she strike a balance? Being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar video sharing company is naturally a demanding task, but Wojcicki manages to be home for dinner with her kids every night.
“I try, because I found that if I’m home for dinner, I can get the scoop from my kids on the day. After my kids go to bed, I check email. It’s about having that balance,” she said.
As well as ensuring she has time both for her career and her family in her own life, Wojcicki hopes to make her employees feel comfortable doing the same.
“I want people to realise that it really is OK, that you can have a family. I don’t feel like I’m a perfect mom, and then there are times at work where I feel like maybe I wasn’t perfect here because of constraints on my time. But having the sum of both of those things going on in my life makes me a better mom at the end of the day, and I think gives me really important perspectives in the workplace as well.”
“Having a child is a big life change but… you can get through it.”
In 1998, Wojcickli and her husband rented out their garage to two computer scientists who later founded Google. She then became Google’s sixteenth employee when the company was very young – she was its first employee to get pregnant.
“I won’t say it was easy, but I decided I’d make it work because I really believed in Google’s potential. When you’re a junior-level woman and get pregnant, people always ask if you’ll quit. But no one asks me that now,” she told Today.
Reflecting on her career, Wojcicki says the one thing women should remember is not to try and plan their too much. She said many of the steps that got her to the top job in a multi-billion dollar tech company by the age of 46 were unplanned.
“Joining Google when I was four months pregnant was a bit of a leap, but sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now.”
Even her entry into the world of technology was unplanned. Wojcicki studied history and literature at Havard and had ambitions to go to on to be an academic after getting a PhD in economics, but then she discovered technology.
“I realised, ‘oh, I can make things, I can sell things, I can have influence’. And then when the Internet came out, you could reach people all over the world. I mean, that was just amazing,” she told FastCompany.
And how will she balance the CEO role with the arrival of her fifth child later this month?
“I’ve already had four maternity leaves, and I’ve taken different amounts of time off with my four kids, depending upon both my personal and work (life). I think it’s important to have a balance. It’s important for the family and the baby to have time. And on the other hand, I have a lot of things happening at YouTube, and I love working here,” she told ReCode.
“So I’m going to do my best to try and balance it, and come up with something that I think works for both my family and office.”