Dispatches from the Field: Moms Deserve More

“If the structures of care are fundamentally broken, women will not be able to go back to work. We still don’t have affordable childcare. We still don’t have paid leave. Still, 86% of housework is done by women” – Reshma Saujani

Interview with Reshma Saujani

It was an honor to speak with Reshma Saujani and hear her thoughts on reimagining motherhood and work.

Read on for highlights from our inspiring conversation:

Many people reading this interview know you from your groundbreaking work as founder and CEO of Girls Who Code. You created the organization to end the gender gap around technology. Beyond teaching girls to code, what stood out as necessary to create more parity in tech jobs?

Girls Who Code has reached over 450,000 girls since 2012. Half of the girls that we’ve served are Black, Latinx, and low income. We’ve learned over the past few years that it’s not just a pipeline problem. When I started Girls Who Code, people said to me, “I want to hire more female engineers and more engineers of color. I can’t find them.” So, I thought, “I will teach as many as I can and then you’ll hire them.” But even once we did that, we found the hiring process was still broken. We like to believe that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but it’s not. It’s hard to give up power. This means we have to do more work to root out sexism and racism inside companies to give women a chance. The other problem we identified is that almost 50% of women will leave their tech jobs by the time they’re 35 because they don’t see others who look like them in the room. And you cannot be what you cannot see. We have to create stereotypes around who can code. We have to give women more role models in this industry. We have to tell young girls that learning how to code is a way to solve problems. I always say that when you teach a girl to code, you’ll solve COVID, cancer, and climate. Because most girls that I know, they’re superheroes, and learning how to code and learning technology becomes one more powerful tool in their backpack of change.

Tell us about your most recent endeavor, the Marshall Plan for Moms, and how it originated.

I started 2020 with a newborn baby that I had via surrogate. I was excited to take my maternity leave and just spend that time really bonding with my son. But then COVID-19 happened, and I found myself having to go back to work when my baby was three weeks old. I was also homeschooling my five-year-old and at the same time working to save my global nonprofit because, when recessions hit, the first funds to be cut are those going to women and girls.

A month after that, I got COVID-19, but it barely registered because I was working 16 hours a day. My liver failed. I was exhausted. When I looked at my Zoom screen, every mother looked exactly how I felt. In April, May, June, and July of last year, we were just grinning and bearing it and saying to ourselves, “When schools open, everything will be okay.” Then a few weeks before schools were planning to open, we found out that they weren’t — and that a bunch of male legislators and policymakers had come up with this idea of a hybrid model where some default caretaker was going to have to log on to a computer for a kid at 9 am, 10 am, 11 am, noon, and so on, all the while maintaining her full-time job. So while they were calculating HVAC equipment and how to keep teachers paid, what terrified me was that they never even thought about us.

And when the December 2020 jobs report came out, all of the jobs lost were women’s jobs. This was untenable, especially in low-income families, where 70% of the breadwinners are mothers. When they lose their job, their entire family suffers. And many of the jobs that weren’t coming back were in industries that disproportionately employ women — retail and health care. That’s why some people were calling it a “she-cession.” And there was no federal jobs retraining program being proposed and we desperately needed one.

Because of the deep work I had been doing around tech and the gender gap, this felt very similar in terms of the dramatic loss of female talent. And I thought, “Where’s the policy? Where’s the plan?” But there was no plan to help working mothers, and I couldn’t believe it. So, out of anger and frustration, I wrote one myself.

Talking to the moms at my PTA, I asked, “What do you need?” I heard, “I need cash.” Moms needed cash to pay the rent, put food on the table, or get help with homeschooling their kids.

The second thing they needed was childcare. When the school system shut down, affordable childcare centers shut down. Because of COVID-19, you couldn’t bring your abuela, or your masi, or your grandfather to come in and do the caretaking. Mothers were forced to take on the third shift, go on food stamps, move in with their parents, or into their cars. This was untenable, especially in low-income families, where 70% of the breadwinners are mothers. When they lose their job, their entire family suffers. Many of these jobs that weren’t coming back. They were in industries that disproportionately employ women — retail and health care. That’s why some people were calling it a “she-cession.” And there was no federal jobs retraining program being proposed and we desperately needed one.

How did you publicize the Marshall Plan for Moms and what has the response been like?

I wrote the Marshall Plan for Moms as an op-ed, and it got a lot of buzz. Then I took out a full-page ad with 50 prominent women, including business leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, and celebrities, saying: We don’t work for free. Mothers are not America’s social safety net. Motherhood is a job, and it’s unpaid. We need a plan in the first 100 days [of the Biden administration]. Soon after, we got two resolutions introduced in Congress and a handful of bills introduced in state legislatures and in municipalities advocating for the key policies. We’re tapping into that populist rage that mothers feel. The push we’ve made to get schools opened has had positive results. But moms are still getting crushed and motherhood is still a job — and we still don’t have affordable childcare or paid leave. Despite that, 86% of housework is still done by women. We are continuing to push on having a conversation on these issues. What I mean by that is pushing for cultural change, pushing for change in the workplace, and pushing for policy change.

President Biden recently introduced the American Plan for Families. Does his plan fit within the Marshall Plan for Moms’ approach?  Do you see one bolstering the other?

I think the Biden plan fits into exactly what we’re saying. We set the frame for the conversation expressing how the structures of care in our society are broken and as long as they’re fundamentally broken, women will not be able to go back to work. Secretary [of the Treasury] Janet Yellen and Vice-President Kamala Harris have used this same frame. The American Families Plan is revolutionary — extending the childcare tax credit, providing affordable childcare to America’s neediest families, and offering paid leave. But we know that getting it passed will be a challenge. And I think that’s really where the Marshall Plan for Moms comes into play. Because I think that whoever wraps their arms around mothers is going to win the midterms and win the next presidential election. You’re not having a different experience if you’re a Republican mom or Democratic mom. You’re feeling screwed either way. You’re feeling unseen either way. This is an opportunity for us to wrap our arms around mothers and say, “we see you and we’re going to help you.”

Can you speak more about the intersection of equality at home and at work?

I have spent most of my life thinking about the workplace and how we create equality in the workplace. How to get mentors, how to get sponsors, how to get to pay equity. I never really focused as a feminist on the home. And what we saw from COVID-19 is that if there isn’t gender justice in the home, there cannot be gender justice in the workplace. You can get as many mentors and sponsors as you want. But if you’re still doing all the cooking and the laundry, the caretaking, the homeschooling, then you’ve got nothing left.

Private companies like the Googles and Microsofts of the world offer paternal leave, but only 7% of American fathers take paternal leave. We want to hire the guy who takes his little ones to Little League but when he’s about to take three months of paternal leave, we say, “Well, what do you have to do? You’re not breastfeeding, are you?” We’ve made no social change in terms of supporting the role of fathers in the home, so we as working women have to take on more jobs. And as a woman, if you want to take a few years off and take care of your kids, you are penalized. The numbers show that women lose almost 40% of their income over 15 years by taking one year off.

So, we’re releasing a Marshall Plan for Moms at Work in the next two months, the playbook on how companies should design their policies to support working parents. Because you can pass legislation, you can make childcare affordable, you can offer paid leave, but if nobody’s taking it, it doesn’t matter.

As this interview is appearing in the Mother’s Day edition of our newsletter, we’d love to hear what an ideal Mother’s Day would be for you.

The idea of Mother’s Day for me, especially this year, is to not give me flowers but to acknowledge all of the unpaid labor that women across the globe do. So don’t give me flowers. Give me support. Marshall Plan for Moms just launched the “Moms Deserve Flower Store” to make this very point.

The Marshall Plan for Moms calls for a framework that makes it possible for women to work and have kids:

Direct payments to moms, who have had their paid labor in the workforce replaced by unseen, unpaid labor at home.

Passing long overdue policies like paid family leave, affordable childcare, and pay equity.

Retraining programs to ensure women can fill the jobs that will exist.

Plans to safely reopen schools 5 days a week.