UN Women – catchy name, shame about the budget

UN Women – catchy name, shame about the budget
February 10, 2011 — London
Writer: Sophie Arie

The UN’s new agency – UN Women – is slowly cranking into gear. But while it has a dynamic leader, a shiny new logo – a pictorial blend of a female gender symbol and the UN’s global map – and a launch party scheduled for later this month, it still lacks proper funding.

There’s a lot of hope and quite a bit of fanfare surrounding this mission. It is widely agreed by UN member countries that the organisation has done little for women and gender equality in the developing world, and that a high-profile agency with real clout and global impact is long overdue. 

UN Women aims to help formulate new policies and global standards on equality and women’s rights and to monitor and support member countries in their efforts to meet those standards.

A lot of thought has gone into the image of the new agency, which brings together four smaller units – UNIFEM, CEDAW, INSTRAW, OSAGI – all of which have been targeting women’s issues for years but are not widely known.

The UN has broken from its tradition of naming organisations with acronyms. Technically this is the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. “UN Women”, however, states its purpose much more powerfully, and will probably register with more people than “UNEGEEW”.  

The head of this new entity, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, is widely respected in the international community and has the rank of under-secretary general, meaning she will have a seat at the highest UN tables.

“This is about leadership. And about articulating what we do much more clearly,” says Moez Doraid, UN Women’s interim head of operations.

It is also about making the UN more efficient. “In this era of financial crisis, this is as much about consolidation as it is about creating something new,” he says.

The agency was created with the unanimous support of UN member countries after decades of debate, and it has a $500m (€366m) budget for its inaugural year.

Only three per cent of that comes from the UN – the rest has been pledged voluntarily by 100 countries, with Spain, Norway the UK, US, Canada and Sweden being the most generous.

Much of the funding is yet to arrive but when it does, $500m looks rather measly. UN Women will still be tiny compared to the major UN agencies such as Unicef (which had a budget of $3.25bn/€2.3bn in 2009) and UNDP (which had $4.77bn/€3.50bn the same year).

It remains to be seen if the rebrand we’ve seen so far can produce the desired results without a bigger injection of cash. 

Sophie Arie is a Monocle contributing editor based in London

Private equity is a man's world... seriously

Fortune
Term Sheet. The latest on private equity, M&A, deals and movements — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley
Private equity is a man's world... seriously
Posted by Dan Primack
February 8, 2011 4:50 pm

Are you a woman who wants to succeed in private equity? Here's some free advice: Learn about sports. And don't get pregnant. In fact, it might be best to project an active antagonism toward motherhood.

Those are the depressing findings of a new study by Catherine Turco, titled: Cultural Foundations of Tokenism : Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry.

Turco was a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School, and currently is a graduate student in the university's sociology department (the study was published by the American Sociological Review).

Her original goal was to examine occupational structure and workplace dynamics in the private equity industry, but she soon changed gears to focus specifically on the experiences of women and African-American men. Both are severe minorities in private equity, which each representing less than 10% of the total professional workforce (a lower figure than in corporate law or investment banking).

What Turco found was that while both groups face serious structural barriers at the outset (i.e., getting a foot in the door), women face far greater cultural challenges.

Before continuing, I cringed a bit at the thesis (our oppression is worse than your oppression). And Turco explicitly acknowledges the prospect for her own biases, being a white female. She notes, however, that African-American women she interviewed also felt that their gender was more relevant than their race within private equity firms. Moreover, Turco says that many African-American men openly discussed personal experiences of racism within their professional lives, thus making Turco more confident that she wasn't only getting one side of the story.

So what is it about being a women that's so problematic within private equity firms?

Turco identifies two primary factors: The first is a knowledge and love of sports. Take a look at the following two quotes from people Turco interviewed -- the first is an African-American man, the second is a woman:

''Sports was the sieve through which I could connect and bond. They had firm sports teams like baseball and basketball. . . . It was really like a locker room. It had that sort of camaraderie. At night in the office, a senior guy would come out and yell 'Stop working. Let's arm wrestle.' and people would start placing bets. . . . You'd get all these goofy competitive things going.''

''There are guys at the firm who play basketball together, and I'm never invited. I know they do serious bonding and then they talk about it on Monday at work. . . . I don't play basketball so if they asked I wouldn't go. But I hate it because I'm missing an opportunity to connect.''

Turco also mentioned that "women who never followed sports before entering [private equity] reported watching SportsCenter or checking ESPN.com regularly now."

There obviously is an implicit assumption here -- that men are into sports and women aren't. There obviously are exceptions to both, which is why Turco's second cultural factor is much more compelling: Motherhood (or the potential for motherhood).

Turco argues that the private equity ideal is someone who puts work above all else, and that most male private equity pros find that to be inherently incompatible with motherhood (even if the mother has multiple paid caregivers or a stay-at-home husband). This is despite the fact, she says, that private equity pros travel less and work shorter days than do their peers in the investment banking, law or consulting worlds. In other words, it's the idea of motherhood that offends, rather than its actual demands.

Some troubling excerpts:

One pregnant respondent described a recent incident with her boss: ''He turned to me and lashed out and said, 'Are you even going to come back? I guess you won't even tell us if you're not. You're probably going to stay home and play with the baby.' He was angry. . . . He had asked me three or four times before if I was coming back to work and I always said, 'I'm definitely working.'. . . For him to ask again, to say it like he made up his mind already, I just know that now he doesn't view me as being as valuable as someone who doesn't have kids.''

Several described incidents in which women were fired or involuntarily transferred to non-deal roles after announcing they were pregnant. One woman said, ''I call each of my kids my 'million dollar babies' because of how much each of them has cost me.''

Statements by recruiters and male LBO investors corroborate women's accounts. One recruiter admitted that up to 20 percent of LBO firms direct her not to send female applicants because ''they'll get pregnant andthey don't want to have to deal with it.'' Of the eight African American men who stated that gender was a bigger obstacle than race in LBO, six mentioned motherhood in their explanations.

Private equity firms, for the most part, are small partnerships. Often they are born of existing relationships, and it's difficult to join if you aren't already "in the club." I get it, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that.

But private equity has a serious problem if it cannot adequately incorporate "others" when it comes time to expand. Women obviously should not be second-class citizens within their own firms or, even worse, be excluded from the hiring process altogether. Private equity firms may have come a long way from the days in which it was literally impossible to find a female partner, but it has not come nearly far enough. The core culture must evolve, not just the payroll demographics.

Baby Gear Maker Skip Hop Pushes Beyond Target and Pottery Barn

Bloomberg
Baby Gear Maker Skip Hop Pushes Beyond Target and Pottery Barn
By Karen E. Klein - Feb 8, 2011 7:23 AM PT

A few months after her first baby was born in 2000, Ellen Diamant had a business idea that might seem obvious to any parent who has ever struggled to carry a diaper bag while maneuvering infant, stroller, and packages: a new design that would attach to the stroller, making the bag’s contents easily accessible.

Over the next year, Diamant, an art director and graphic designer who had worked in the fashion and publishing industries, began sketching a new kind of bag, one with special stroller attachment clips and a contemporary look that was miles from what she calls “Winnie-the-Pooh styling.”

By 2002, Ellen had a prototype she dubbed the Duo Diaper Bag that she tested with friends and colleagues. By the next year the bag was popular with local mothers clubs and play groups Ellen visited. The product’s success persuaded Ellen and her husband, Michael, a serial entrepreneur who built his first successful Web design company in the early 1990s, to launch Skip Hop in the fall of 2003 to design, manufacture, and sell an expanded line of products for parents, from diaper bags to toys and nursery bedding.

The couple invested $50,000 to get the company started -- despite having lost $500,000 on Michael’s second business venture, iClips, a year earlier. The failure of that company -- an early video-sharing site -- was difficult. “You feel like you don’t know what’s going to happen, you can’t pay your vendors, you’re laying people off,” Michael recalls. Along with their own investment, iClips lost more than $6.5 million in venture capital and money from friends and family. “It’s awkward at dinner, at least for a few years,” he says.

Today Skip Hop employs 31 and sells a range of product types to specialty, chain, and online retailers in the U.S. and overseas, including branded lines at Target and co- branded toys and bags at Pottery Barn Kids. Ellen says the New York City company had $20 million in revenue in 2010 and projects $25 million this year, a quarter from international sales.

MORE IMPACT THAN YOU’D EXPECT

Small, nimble innovators such as Skip Hop have had an outsize impact on the juvenile market, says Ali Wing, the founder of baby products retailer Giggle. For years, the baby industry was dominated by huge corporate players and tiny neighborhood boutiques. “To have designers who can bring innovations to market, with the greater scale and replication Skip Hop has achieved, has forced change on the larger market,” she says.

Gartner analyst Janet Suleski sees this juvenile products market growing, particularly in “emerging economies such as China, Brazil, India, and some smaller markets, such as Turkey.” She notes that smaller competitors can be more nimble than larger competitors, bringing products to market more quickly. “What smaller companies lack, however, is supply chain power to mass-produce large numbers of those innovative items quickly, so it may not be possible to meet the full demand,” she says.

Early on, the Diamants introduced the $49.99 Duo at a New York City trade show. It was an immediate hit, with a dozen retailers signing on to carry it. Michael didn’t take long to realize that baby products had gone global via the Internet: “You bring a new product to market, and moms get excited about it, and the whole world knows about it tomorrow.” The company spent at least $100,000 for a high-quality online presence, including photography, advertising, branding, and a Web store. Ellen says she drew on her publishing background to put a professional face on the company’s look and feel. “We wanted to be trendsetters,” she says. “We didn’t want to look like a mom-and-pop, which does not inspire confidence.”

Other than establishing a robust online presence, Michael Diamant says driving Skip Hop’s overseas sales is about finding strong distributors, vetting them, and granting them exclusive sales rights. “A good distributor for us has other lines we respect and is already selling to retailers we like. When we research a market, we find out what the big four retailers are, what brands they carry, whether the distributor sells there, and what kind of volume they’re doing,” he says. He adds that setting up yearly minimum sales is an important spur for distributors to invest in the Skip Hop brand. “The distributor has to spend money to promote you, and you have to give them time to build the business. If you become known as a good supplier, the word spreads.”

KEY STEP: DISTRIBUTION IN CHINA

Pricing is also crucial to Skip Hop’s overseas sales, especially since many of its products are subject to duty rates as high as 18 percent. A few years ago, Skip Hop opened a distribution center in China, where its products are manufactured. That allows distributors to retrieve product in China rather than having it shipped to the U.S. and then back overseas again. “I used to have to charge 20 percent more to cover shipping and U.S. duties, and the price of the bag went up to $90 in Europe. You don’t want to be an expensive import. You want to be competitive,” Michael says.

Of course, selling overseas is as frustrating as it is lucrative for Skip Hop. “We exceed the safety laws in the U.S., but some markets don’t have laws, and retailers set their own rules that don’t meet any known standards,” he says. “These retailers want you to do specialized tests, which get very expensive.” Brand knockoffs are a particular problem in China, where copy-cat Skip Hop products hit the streets before the real thing hits the shelves. The company hires shoppers to purchase the knockoffs from “shady characters,” Michael says, and they bring the evidence to local authorities, who will usually shut counterfeiters down.

Selling in 54 countries means having to use dynamic tactics to stanch intellectual property theft, Ellen says. The company applies for international patents and uses technology available through such online retailers as eBay and Alibaba.com to foil thieves. It relies on its overseas distributors to report knockoffs, but they are still common. “It happens all the time. All we can do is hope that our branding is what people really want,” Ellen says. The company’s top overseas markets are in the U.K., Spain, and Japan, but its products are sold in such far-flung places as Dubai and Poland.

Although many small business owners grumble about government regulation and business laws, Michael says selling overseas has made him grateful for countries with strong protections and legal remedies. “If a New Zealand Costco is carrying counterfeits, we can send them a letter, and they’ll pull them off the shelves the next day,” he says. “I want the rules. They work for me.”

In the long term, the Diamants hope to maintain the 40 percent growth they’ve achieved in recent years. They plan to localize websites better for their top international markets, and Ellen is working on designs for products that may not sell well in the U.S. but are big sellers overseas. For instance, a European distributor recently asked for Skip Hop “reins,” the kind of leash attachments for wayward toddlers that are not terribly popular in the U.S. but are used widely in Europe. Skip Hop is also working on bedding that matches international mattress and crib sizes that differ from American standards. “We want to round out our categories to offer overall solutions for parents, so we’re a one- stop solution for bath, bedding, toys, and on-the-go categories,” Ellen says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Karen E. Klein at karen@kareneklein.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Leiber at nleiber@bloomberg.net

Women at the top

FT Home > Comment > Editorial
Women at the top
Published: February 8 2011 23:21 | Last updated: February 8 2011 23:21

Europe’s most prominent banker should know better. Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, was right when he said more women should be appointed to top executive roles. But he revealed how far attitudes must change by embellishing his statement with the misplaced and patronising comment that this would make boards “more colourful” and “more beautiful”.

The tone of Mr Ackermann’s remarks shows that not everyone sees the business case for challenging the status quo. Diversity is not a feminist issue – and nor is it about prettification. Failing to recruit from the widest possible talent pool is bad for a company, its investors and society at large. There is a risk, too, that a board narrow in its representation may also be blinkered or conformist in its strategy.

EDITOR’S CHOICE
Editorial: Northern lights - Jun-15

Analysis: Skirting the boards - Jun-15

Getting women on board - Apr-29

Women crack glass ceiling from above - Jul-23

Women’s share of UK board seats stalls - Jun-27

Study says female directors bring added value - Jun-27

A call to raise female representation in the boardroom is welcome: in 2009, women held only 11.7 per cent of executive jobs in large European companies. That is lamentably low. Germany, home to Deutsche Bank, has a female chancellor; women are well represented in politics at both federal and state level. Yet Deutsche Bank, the largest German bank by assets, has had only one woman on its board – that was 15 years ago.

Mr Ackermann rejects a recent call by a German minister for a quota to increase the number of women in senior jobs. The FT has already stated its opposition to formal quotas, a path some European countries, such as Norway, have taken. Quotas focus on only one aspect of diversity – gender – and punish small companies. Such legislation also fails to address the lower levels in a business. Voluntary targets are preferable to regulation. And chairmen of all-male boards should explain why they think that dominance acceptable.

As for Mr Ackermann, his contract at the German bank expires in 2013. That means a board job is opening up. Is it time, perhaps, for Deutsche Bank to review its own executive recruitment?

Science gender gap probed

Published online 7 February 2011 | Nature 470, 153 (2011) | doi:10.1038/470153a
News
Science gender gap probed
Overt sexism is no longer the norm, but societal barriers remain for women in science.
Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib

Too rare a sight: working on a neutrino experiment at Fermilab.P. Ginter/Science Faction/Corbis
Goodbye glass ceiling; so long old-boys club. The metaphor that best describes the challenge facing women in science today is the invisible web. Its multiple strands — some social, some biological, some institutional — can make it significantly harder for female researchers to achieve as much, as fast, as their male counterparts.

So concludes a study that set out to explore the persistent gap in the number of women in maths-intensive fields such as physics, computer science and engineering. It finds that overt discrimination of the sort that would make a female candidate less likely to be hired, published or funded when competing against an equally qualified male is largely a thing of the past. Instead, trade-offs between pursuing a career and raising a family, coupled with societal factors and gender expectations that can influence professional choices at a young age, are more likely to account for the shortage of women in some fields.

A 2008 survey of US universities by the National Science Foundation revealed that less than 30% of PhDs in the physical sciences were awarded to women. Higher up the ranks, women make up only about 10% of full professorships in physics-related disciplines. Yet when psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sifted through 20 years of research, they found little evidence of continued gender bias in journal reviewers, granting agencies or hiring committees. Their analysis, published on 7 February (S. J. Ceci and W. M. Williams Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1014871108; 2011), contrasts with reports that suggest overt discrimination remains a significant problem.

"There are constant and unsupportable allegations that women suffer discrimination in these arenas, and we show conclusively that women do not," says Williams.

Ceci and Williams conclude that female researchers lag behind their male counterparts in professional advancement because of a broader set of societal realities. Much of the problem, they say, can be boiled down to external factors related to family formation and child rearing. Motherhood can make women less likely to choose research careers than male scientists of equal ability, or lead them to choose academic positions with larger teaching loads but more regular hours, sacrificing time for research. The authors also point out that the strict tenure timeline conflicts directly with women's window for child rearing.

"A woman who has young children is still expected to come up for tenure 5–6 years after she starts her job," says Williams. "It creates a virtually insurmountable obstacle."

Such constraints affect women across all academic disciplines, Ceci and Williams point out, so additional factors must account for why the gender gap in science is greatest in maths-intensive fields. This could include a difference in the fields women prefer, a choice that can be socially influenced, regardless of aptitude.

"They are probably right that overt discrimination has declined, but it's naive to suggest that judging applicants differently based on their gender is a thing of the past," says Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), based in Washington DC. In their study, Ceci and Williams criticize an AAUW report published last year that claims there is discrimination in peer review and "a systematic underrating of female applicants" in hiring.

Ceci and Williams say that a continuing focus on discrimination could be drawing attention away from the true causes of the disparity. They suggest, for example, that gender-sensitivity training for review and hiring committees may no longer be needed, and argue that efforts should be redirected to promoting flexible tenure policies for women with young children. Educational programmes could also help female graduate students to make more informed decisions about family and career.

Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist who chaired a landmark study of gender inequality in faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, cautions that progress in gender equality could backslide if successful practices are abandoned.

She observes that some family-friendly changes are already being made at MIT, such as the availability of on-campus day care for faculty members with young children. "We're about two-thirds of the way home," Hopkins says, but she notes that many institutions have further to go.

Susan Wojcicki: The most important Googler you've never heard of

San Jose Mercury News
Susan Wojcicki: The most important Googler you've never heard of
By Mike Swift mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 02/07/2011 07:42:43 AM PST

Yes, Google started in Susan Wojcicki's rented garage. But in her mind, that might be the single least important fact about her long and deep relationship with the Internet giant.

Thirteen years ago, the then-tiny company's former landlord became its 16th employee and first marketing manager. Today, she is one of its 12 senior vice presidents, although by one measure she is first among equals: The advertising products she oversees accounted for about 96 percent of Google's revenues in 2010.

In her years at Google, the 42-year-old Wojcicki (pronounced Whoa-jit-ski) has been a driving force in many of the company's signature initiatives: AdSense, which places Google advertising on other websites and blogs, and its acquisitions of DoubleClick and YouTube. Even the doodles that distinguish Google's home page were developed by her.

Wojcicki, in short, might be the most important Googler you've never heard of -- even many who recall her garage's place in Silicon Valley history don't realize that its former owner went on to become arguably the key figure in Google's online advertising juggernaut.

Wojcicki's contributions to Google's growth are "absolutely not" appreciated outside of the Googleplex, said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a former Googler. "I don't think she's concerned about that. Susan's interested in doing a great job and making sure her team gets recognition for the things they do. ... Within Google, the executives and certainly the people on her team have enormous respect for her."

Inside the company, the low-key, even-keeled executive is known as a talented manager who inspires people under her with her willingness to share credit. As Google's chief moneymaker -- advertising products under Wojcicki brought in $28.2 billion in revenue in 2010 -- she also has a striking belief in the odd mix of professorial idealism and capitalistic ambition that comprises Google's sense of self.

"The reason I like my job is that I have this desire to create," Wojcicki told the Mercury News recently in a rare interview. "I have this desire to create things and build things, and Google has enabled me to build and create things and to build products that are used by people all over the globe."

Wojcicki has still another role at Google. She has helped shape the company's unconventional culture, drawing on her experience as the first Googler to have a baby and as a pioneer who has navigated the cultural land mines that make women so rare among Silicon Valley executives.

Though she is guarded personally, Wojcicki made clear in the interview how important that role is to her. "I have tried to be a leader," she said. "I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons."

Wojcicki's clout at Google reflects her unique relationship with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Like them, she is from a family of academics. "No one in my family had worked in business until I came along," she said.

The three met when Brin and Page paid Wojcicki $1,700 a month to rent the garage of her house in Menlo Park, the first home for a newly incorporated Google in 1998. Along with the parade of venture capitalists, journalists and other visitors who found their way to the offices of the embryonic search engine through Wojcicki's living room was the woman who became Brin's wife -- Susan's youngest sister, Anne.

More than a dozen years after that first encounter, Wojcicki is one of about a dozen executives who convene with Page and Brin in Google's boardroom each Friday for a meeting dubbed "Execute." Those newly inaugurated meetings are aimed at achieving Page's stated mission, as he becomes CEO in April, of remaking Google into a company that can innovate with the nimbleness of competitors like Facebook.

But her prominence within Google contrasts sharply with her relative anonymity outside.

Costolo had just finished a chat with Wojcicki at a recent tech conference when another executive came up beside him.

"They said something like, 'Hey, who was that you were talking to over there?' And I said, 'It's Susan Wojcicki,' " Costolo recalled recently. "And they said, 'Oh, that's Susan Wojcicki!' "

Inspired marketing

A Silicon Valley native who grew up on the Stanford campus as the oldest daughter of the chair of the physics department, Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard before eventually joining Google as its first marketing manager.

"We had no marketing budget, but I was supposed to market the company -- by myself," she recalled. "It was a little overwhelming."

Yet she quickly made the crucial early decision to embed Google's search box for free in university websites and elsewhere across the Internet to build traffic.

But Wojcicki's biggest impact at Google has been developing AdSense, which transformed the Web by allowing hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs to make money by displaying Google ads. AdSense spread more than $6 billion in ad revenue across the Internet in 2010, and now has more than 1 million websites and blogs running Google's ads. It is the company's second-largest source of revenue, after search advertising on its own sites.

Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, had the idea to run ads within Google's e-mail service. But he and others say it was Wojcicki, with the backing of Brin, who organized the team that adapted that idea into an enormously successful product.

Despite her success with AdSense, Wojcicki by 2006 was running a Google unit -- Google Video -- that was getting trounced by a small startup called YouTube, where millions of people shared their self-produced videos online.

Wojcicki's solution to that problem shows her calm under fire. With just a day's notice, she developed and presented to Google's board the financial model justifying the $1.65 billion purchase.

"I knew it was going to be really hard for us to catch up, and that this was a real phenomenon," Wojcicki said. "I understood it, because we had our own product."

YouTube initially was a huge money-loser, and it landed Google in a brutal legal fight with Viacom, which charged that Google had knowingly benefited from pirated content. But the combination of the DoubleClick, YouTube and other acquisitions, such as the AdMob mobile ad network, has begun to pay dividends. This fall, Google for the first time revealed revenue figures for display and mobile ads, saying the company was on track for $2.5 billion a year in display and $1 billion in mobile revenue -- its first major source of revenue outside keyword search ads.

Wojcicki's fingerprints also are on some of Google's most controversial products, including some advertising programs that have been blasted by privacy advocates because they collect voluminous data on users.

"Google has not been honest about its data-collection practices. It tries to veil what it does," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Google likes to pose as a company that is transparent and considers privacy, but the truth of the matter is that it's all about the collection of data from the individual user."

Some privacy advocates have derided Google for trying to soft-pedal their concerns. One example they could cite is a blog post Wojcicki wrote in 2009, announcing that Google would start tracking users' movements across the Internet in order to target advertising -- an unpopular practice with many users. But the post, headlined "Making ads more interesting," never used the word "tracking." She described it, benignly, as "interest-based advertising."

While helping build the Google juggernaut, Wojcicki gave birth to four children. Until recently, she drove a minivan, and now drives a Toyota Highlander hybrid suitable for soccer mom duties. She said a key to her work-family philosophy is to "compartmentalize," broadcasting clear boundaries between work and home. "My kids know I'm home every night for dinner," she said.

Her sister Anne, now CEO of 23andMe, a Mountain View company that maps people's genetic traits, said she has adopted her older sister's rule for her own son with Brin -- she'll do no business travel while children are very young.

"If I have a problem, I always go to Susan," Anne said. "She taught me if you're going to go home and be with your kids, that's OK."

Keeping things on track

With Page moving up to become CEO, executives like Wojcicki and another early Googler, YouTube chief Salar Kamangar, are expected to step up and take more visible roles. That is something Wojcicki may find uncomfortable. Former Googlers say she has a knack for recruiting and motivating other strong leaders, but shuns the spotlight for herself.

Pete Koomen, who joined Google in 2006 fresh from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and not long afterward was chosen by Wojcicki to work directly with the founders and senior executives in setting Google's goals before each quarter, said he was struck by the regard Page and Brin, both of whom are strong personalities, had for Wojcicki.

"They are just incredibly imaginative, and meetings can have a tendency to go off track a little bit," said Koomen, who left Google last year. "Susan has always had this amazing ability to focus them and challenge them."

Costolo and Koomen say Wojcicki's hallmark is to allow her teams to take credit for accomplishments.

"The way she builds her teams is by emphasizing the individuals on the team and letting them get credit when they've done something. It builds confidence in the inexperienced folks," said Koomen, who now heads a startup in San Francisco.

"Whenever I try to describe what makes a good operating executive," said Costolo, "the person I've got in my mind is Susan Wojcicki."

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.

Susan Wojcicki
Age: 42
Joined Google: 1999, as employee No. 16
Position: Senior vice president responsible for all of Google's advertising and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Analytics
Education: Bachelor's degree, Harvard University; master's in economics, UC Santa Cruz; MBA, UCLA
Family: Married to Google executive Dennis Troper; four children

"Groupon for Moms": Plum District Finds a Following

Fast Company
"Groupon for Moms": Plum District Finds a Following
BY DAVID ZAX
Thu Feb 3, 2011

The deals site also just secured $8.5 million in funding. And by bringing moms--who source the deals--back into the workforce, there's a bit of Mary Kay thrown into the mix.

How's this for a compelling, inter-generational pitch: "It's Groupon-for-moms meets Mary-Kay-without-the-lipstick."

That's how Megan Gardner, the CEO of Plum District ( http://www.plumdistrict.com/ ), describes her coupon site to Fast Company (and, we're guessing, a few others at one point or another). Something of a mouthful, maybe, but it covers all the bases: Plum District is a daily deals site in the Groupon mold, only "by Moms, for Moms," in the words of the site. And it's on the rise, last week raising $8.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and others.

Gardner, who has an MBA from Harvard and was most recently in business development for Ameriprise, realized that there was a gap to be filled in the daily deals space. "Fifty million moms control 85% of household spending," she says. "That's how we honed in on this vertical."

Not only do mothers control the majority of household spending; they also know their communities well, and have or can easily forge relationships with local vendors. Realizing this untapped resource, Plum District decided on a novel model: have the moms not only buy the deals, but source them. Plum District is built by a fleet of part-time workers who arrange Plum District deals, winding up with a fraction of the revenue resulting from each. Plum District's top seller, Jillian Griffin of Newport Beach, has been orchestrating deals since soon after Plum District's launch a few months ago. So far, she's on track to make six figures this year. "She's a bulldog," says Gardner.

A mommy vertical also makes sense because of the ways mothers can act as ambassadors for Plum District in their communities, marketing the deals in unexpected and impromptu ways. A recent example of this comes from the Southern California team. Someone there realized that on the day of little league baseball sign up, an immense amount of traffic would be pouring into the little league website. Plum District partnered with the league site, arranged to put up a widget during the traffic surge, and donated some money to the league for every new mom who signed-up via the widget.

It's insights like these--that the channels of commerce are nuanced, often knit-up in the fabric of everyday life--that makes Plum District's model interesting. A model which, in some respects, is not a new one: "The Tupperware model has been around for a while," says Gardner. "What's different about this is the tactics the sales team uses."

Does she have plans to expand the model to other verticals? Moms aren't the only subset of humanity, of course. Democratic political strategist Mark Penn, who invented the phrase "soccer moms," was famous for spinning out terms for other key groups--"wired workers," "office-park dads," "mom-fluentials." Will Plum District be moving to tackle these other imagined communities?

Not immediately--but Gardner wouldn't rule it out. She notes that just the other day she saw a similar site for African-Americans spring up.

"I was at a party the other day," says Gardner, "when a stay-at-home dad came up to me and said, 'I like your site, but I want my own vertical. I want Deals for Dads.'"