Good morning.
Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who died of cancer last week at the age of 56, was a visionary leader in tech and in life. Unlike Elon Musk, who has stoked fear about a population collapse while cutting parental leave at Twitter (now X), Wojcicki understood the importance of paid maternity leave as a retention tool. She was Google’s first employee to take it, having let its cofounders work out of her garage before joining the startup in 1999 when she was four months pregnant.
As she wrote shortly before giving birth to her fifth child in 2014, when Google increased paid maternity leave to 18 from 12 weeks in 2007, the rate at which new moms left the company fell by 50%. (Google owns YouTube.) At the time, she noted that the U.S. was the only country in the developed world that didn’t offer government-mandated paid maternity leave, according to the International Labor Organization, and one of two that didn’t offer it among the 185 countries surveyed. The other was Papua New Guinea. Ten years later, there is still no national policy, though 13 states and the District of Columbia now mandate paid family leave.
The ability to access paid leave has a marginal impact on the decision to have children—Canada has a lower fertility rate than the U.S. despite generous parental leave policies. And many Americans do have access to unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. But studies suggest that paid leave impacts labor participation rates. Pregnancy has long been a life event that catapults women off their career tracks and out of their companies. Women who get support in taking time off are more inclined to come back.
I don’t want to minimize Wojcicki’s other accomplishments. Along with being instrumental in the development of Google, she advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006 and led it from 2014 to 2023. Being a mother didn’t define her as a CEO any more than it has defined me as a journalist.
But Wojcicki shared her own experiences as a working mother to inspire others. In an industry where high-profile peers like Marissa Mayer promised to be at their desk mere days after birth —a tradition continued by leaders like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who intends to take no maternity leave when she gives birth to her third child—Wojcicki took 15 weeks off after giving birth to her youngest child. While that may sound like a lot of time off for a new CEO, she understood that creating a culture of work-life balance starts at the top.
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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