The number of well-known women leading tech companies is small.

And now, most of them have headed for the exits.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Kareno.

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First to leave was Cheryl Sandberg, the long-time chief operating officer at Facebook and

Metta, known for her best-selling book about women and leadership lean in.

Last summer, she stepped down after 14 years.

Then last month, Susan Wajiski, the only woman CEO in Big Tech, announced her departure

from YouTube, a role she'd served in for nine years after joining Google in its earliest

days.

They've left a void of visible women at the pinnacle of the tech world.

It's a trend columnist Beth Coett recently wrote about for Bloomberg News.

And she says, the way women leaders in tech are often described gives us a clue about

what they face as they rise to the top.

A lot of these women who had been extremely senior, extremely accomplished, really reached

the peak of business in tech were still being cast as the adult supervision or grown-ups.

And this, I think, can be really damaging.

It kind of undermines their ability to be viewed as the people with the big vision, which

I think is so important when you are being considered for a CEO job.

Yeah, you included a list of sort of words and phrases that had been used in various

instances to describe YouTube's former CEO, Susan Wajiski, that included non-threatening,

...