The CEO expecting her fifth child - Women's Agenda

The CEO expecting her fifth child

Susan Wojcicki has been called the most important person in advertising, named the 12th most powerful woman on the Forbes 100, and is one of just six female CEOs of the top 100 tech companies in the US.

She’s running the world’s largest video site, a business reportedly worth $5.6 billion, while juggling motherhood with a golden rule to be home by 6pm to join her school-aged children for dinner. Sounds like she’s already pretty busy.

Well, the recently appointed CEO of Youtube announced to tech news site Re/Code that she is pregnant with her fifth child, due later this year.

Still, she’s seems more than ready to manage it all. “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,” she said when asked if she would take time off.

“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.”

Wojcicki appears to have found balance by inextricably linking motherhood with her work. In an interview with FastCompany earlier this year she said she associates each of her children with Google milestones.

“I joined Google when I was pregnant, so my oldest I’ve associated with Google. Then I worked with the team and together we created AdSense after I came back from maternity leave (with my second). My third one, I associate with YouTube. The last one is DoubleClick,” she said.

In 1998 she left her role at Intel to join Google as it’s sixteenth employee while she was four months pregnant — not only making the giant career leap, she also housed the company in her garage during the early days. Before taking the role of CEO at YouTube in February, Wojcicki was senior vice president of Google’s advertising and analytics products.

She says she’s been called the “mum of Google” due to the fact she way nurturing the company in its early days, and became the first of its employees to have a baby.  She also designed Google’s progressive, in-house daycare centre.

Wojcicki recently spoke about making that bold career move, despite also being pregnant at the time.

It “was a bit of a leap, but sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now,” Wojcicki said in an interview with Glamour in May.

And Wojcicki’s advice for any working women thinking of starting a family? “Don’t forget that it gets easier! Having a child is a big life change, but the really hectic period is relatively short,” she says. “You can get through it.”

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