23andMe CEO’s new quest: Respect for breastfeeding moms
“Don’t hide what’s normal,” YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki once told her youngest sister, Anne.
Not that Anne Wojcicki was trying to conceal anything on Sept. 21 when she was at the private Maroon Creek Club in Aspen, Colorado. Anne Wojcicki is co-founder and chief executive of 23andMe, a personal genomics and biotechnology company based in Sunnyvale, California.
While the ski resort town attracts Hollywood A-listers, Washington elite and the 1% of the 1%, Wojcicki was in Aspen for a conference of elite business leaders.
Wojcicki, who was just named “The Pioneer” on Marie Claire’s list of 25 Women Changing the Future, said the meetings had let out when her infant daughter needed to eat. With the sky threatening rain, she ducked into a booth near the first hole of the golf course. No one was around, she said, when she sat down on a bench and began nursing. However, soon after she started, an employee drove up in a golf cart and told her she should breastfeed elsewhere, she said.
“This hut was empty,” Wojcicki remembers thinking. “You just kicked me out of a chair for no reason. There was no empathy.”
She relocated across the street to “a pile of rocks on the ground” to continue feeding her daughter. She was stunned. “People with small children need help. It’s hard enough when you have small children,” said Wojcicki, who is a single mom to her newborn and shares two other children with her ex-husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “Breastfeeding is an important part of child rearing.”
“It’s odd. I don’t know,” said Maroon Creek Club General Manager David Chadbourne, when he was reached for comment about the incident. He said he had been unaware of the incident. “We have members that breastfeed here all the time.”
He said Wojcicki’s experience was not “a fair representation of what the club was all about.” He apologized, saying he wished she had told him personally about what had happened, even if part of the purpose of tweeting about the incident, which she did afterward, was because women shouldn’t have to lean on privilege to get the respect they deserve when it comes to feeding their children.
With her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing capri leggings and a hoodie, Wojcicki, who is No. 33 on Forbes’s 2019 list of Richest Self-Made Women, admits she “didn’t look like I was part of a fancy conference, not that it should have mattered.”
“I often live in a little bubble,” where she’s treated well, Wojcicki said in a phone interview. “But it’s nice to be in a situation to see how people are really being treated. Everyone should be treated well and be made to feel welcome.”
Wojcicki said it would never occur to her to try to hide breastfeeding; instead, she wants to help normalize it, including at the 23andMe offices, where there are breastfeeding rooms with desks, pumps, lockers, snacks and phones. There’s also a 1,500-squarefoot playroom for kids, for employees whose children have a child care issue or who have to pop into the office for a shorter visit. There is paid parental leave at 23andMe for all employees, a fertility benefit plan, adoption assistance plan and surrogacy reimbursement program.
“I hate pretending that you’re something you’re not, and a good percentage of my employees have kids,” she said.
Transparency has been among the guiding principles of Wojcicki’s career, because giving people something they can’t see (DNA results) requires a fundamental trust.
That’s at the crux of what irked her at the Maroon Creek Club: how little she was seen, despite what was right there with her.
“It was such an intentional move, and there was absolutely no remorse. I was so shocked,” she said. “It’s a world that needs a little more empathy for people. When you are breastfeeding your child, you’re vulnerable, and they took advantage of me. They kicked me while I was down.”