Reshma Saujani: Founder and CEO of Moms First

“I realized I’m never going to finish the fight for gender equality for my girls if I don’t finish the fight for their moms. That’s what led me to step down as CEO of Girls Who Code and start Moms First, which I had never intended to do,” says Reshma Saujani. “The reality is that the pandemic played a huge hand in that. But what was happening for women in the pandemic wasn’t going to start and end with the pandemic.”

We interviewed Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, the non-profit organization launched in 2011 with the mission to close the gender gap in tech. For over ten years, she served as CEO, leading to change the face of programming as we know it. At the end of 2020, and spurred by witnessing the impacts of the pandemic on women’s lives, Saujani also became Founder and CEO of Moms First (formerly Marshall Plan for Moms).

Through Moms First, she is leading the campaign to transform our workplaces, our culture and our government to enable moms to thrive. Her fourth book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think) proposes clear and necessary structural and cultural changes to support women in the workplace, and puts a halt on telling women to change.

Saujani was a recent keynote ‘fireside chat’ speaker for the 2023 Catalyst Awards Conference, the premier gender equity conference for advocates of diversity, equity and inclusion. With the conference themed Accelerating Equity on All Fronts—So Women Thrive, Saujani emphasized the need to drastically change the discussion around women and the workplace. She also iterated key actions that policy makers and organizations need to take, such as family-friendly policies, paid leave, and childcare to support equity, engagement, retention and advancement among women.

Saujani spoke to us about how changing the workplace to work for women – as Catalyst has researched, advocated and reimagined for over 60 years – is really not a women’s problem.

On women in the workplace:

“At the conference, I spoke about the core shifts that need to happen in the workplace to support women in leadership. The idea of supporting women in their roles as mothers is really new for Corporate America. It’s a different conversation than the one we’ve been having, because the conversation we’ve been having is really what I call the ‘big lie of corporate feminism’: that if we just raise our hand, if we lean in a little harder, then we can ‘girlboss’ our way to the top. But that leaves out the fact that two-thirds of the caregiving work is being done by women, and that women come to work already doing two and a half jobs. So this idea of ‘having it all’ is just a euphemism for ‘doing it all.’

We have to stop trying to fix women and fix the system. We need to accept the fact that workplaces have never been built for moms, so let’s redesign them for moms now. In my book, Pay Up, I lay out some strategies that companies can actually do to support working moms.

One, it begins with supporting moms with childcare. Childcare in this country is unaffordable and unavailable. 40% of parents have gone into debt because of the cost of childcare. The reality is that childcare isn’t a personal problem that you or I have to solve. It’s an economic issue. Women cannot work without childcare. So companies, for the first time, really need to step up and start providing childcare benefits – whether that’s a subsidy or back-up care. They have to start providing that support.

The second thing is paid leave. Many companies still don’t have gender-neutral paid leave policy. In a heteronormative relationship, whether a man takes paternity leave has huge consequences for women. The more men, quite frankly, that are taking paid leave, the better for the equity in a family. Right now, the vast majority of men take fewer than ten days off after having a child. So companies need to not only offer gender-neutral paid leave policy but also incentivize or mandate it.

The third thing is the motherhood penalty. The mom bias is contributing to a huge pay gap between mothers and fathers. Studies have shown that men earn 6% more when they become a dad whereas women earn 4% less when they become a mom.”

On her shift from Girls Who Code to Moms First:

“During the pandemic, I had a new ‘pandemic’ baby and I was homeschooling my six-year-old. My entire leadership team were working moms with young children, and we were barely making it. I saw so many of my students had to stay at home and take care of their siblings, instead of going on to major in computer science at college, because their mothers were essential workers. The fact that we had a broken structure of childcare in our country was continuing the generational cycle of poverty.

Moms have really been in crisis for decades – even the fact that the United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have paid family and medical leave. The fact that we’ve never made childcare affordable or available for moms. The fact that we’ve always paid mothers less than we pay fathers for doing the same exact work. If we didn’t actually solve those three things, what’s the point of even telling girls to go to college? What’s the point of even telling them they can be everything or anything when we’re just again perpetuating them in this cycle of oppression and inequality?

So I stepped down from Girls Who Code, and I’ve built Moms First, over the past year and a half, up to a grassroots movement of over half a million moms and supporters. We’re fighting for three things: childcare, paid leave, and equal pay. And it’s not just about a single piece of legislation or a workplace policy or about getting equal pay. It’s all three. They’re all interconnected.”

On the broken narrative of success:

“I think the big lie is essentially that if we only fix women, we can have equality. So again, what we keep telling women is that if you just raised your hand, if you just leaned in harder, if you just ‘girlbossed’ your way to the top… Just think about the whole conversation about equal pay. What we tell women, usually, is you’re just not negotiating well enough.

But that’s going one woman at a time rather than saying the entire structure of how we compensate women is wrong, and we actually have to build an algorithm or audit our pay policies. Those are the structural changes that we have to make instead of telling women, ‘The problem is you. You just didn’t negotiate for yourself.’

Everything around ‘the big lie’ is about making women feel like they’re the problem. They’re not the problem. The structure is the problem. Workplaces are the problem. And, even basic things like workdays are 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and school days are 8:30 am to 3:00 pm. We’re just setting women up to fail by having these structures in place that are leading to us, again, never being able to truly succeed. We’re not set up to succeed. We’ve never been set up to succeed.”

On how the future of women and work will be different than we think:

“Why it’s different than you think is that I’m not going to tell you how to fix yourself. I’m not going to tell you, yet again, how to just get a mentor, get a sponsor, or learn how to negotiate.

I’m going to walk you through the history of how workplaces have never been set up for women. And I’m going to give you strategies that are radically different than the strategies that you’ve been given. The vast majority of women that participate in an ERG are not taught how to ask for childcare. They’re not taught how to take your paid leave and not feel guilty about it. They’re taught how to learn another skillset. Get a sponsor. Be more confident.

But when you do those things, and you still feel like you’re barely making it again, you think something is wrong with you. No. Something is actually wrong with the system as it’s been set up.”

On the cultural change necessary to begin to support working moms:

“We do not value what we do not aspire to be. And being a mom, in America, is often times not something so many people aspire to be. Because, too often, motherhood in America is not seen as something that is respected and valued and dignified. Consider even the fact that we have countless school shootings and every day mothers, like me, have to drop off our children at school and not know if we’re going to see them again. That we continue to allow that to happen in this country just shows the lack of value and respect we have for the role of mothers and for our children.

So, to me, that’s cultural. Culturally, we have to become a society that says, we need to support mothers and we need to support children. Well, that means that one in four women should not have to go back to work less than two weeks after having a baby when they’re wearing an adult diaper. That means that we shouldn’t have daycare that’s not safe or that’s not affordable. We shouldn’t have parents piecing it together because, as a society, we want people to have children. Innovation dies in a nation when you have a declining birth rate, and, right now in the United States, we have a declining birth rate.”

On what women can do:

“I think that we have to fight. I think that we need to ask for what we need. I think we need to stop apologizing. I think we need to not think something is wrong with us and instead see the system as broken and demand for it to change. Right now, we’re in the middle of doing a Moms First Challenge. I joke that when we went on godaddy.com to get the URL for Moms First, it was available, because the idea of putting yourself first is very radical.

So, how do you teach that? In the first week of our challenge, we did that by having women write down all of the tasks of unpaid labor that you do. This week, we said to do something for yourself. In my case, I’ve had a horrible stomach virus where I need to be on a pretty extensive set of antibiotics, and I put it off for four years because it was never the right time. This week, I’m doing it. I’m canceling my week if I don’t feel well, and the world will be okay. So many women put off their doctors appointments and the things they need to do for themselves because we don’t live in a society that allows us to put ourselves first. We’ve been conditioned to think that that’s selfish.

Also, statistically, a lot of women will quit rather than saying ‘I can’t get on a call at 6 p.m. because that’s dinner time for my family.’ Or ‘I’m not going to travel three days a week because I have a young child.’ But they would rather quit than say, ‘hey, this is what I need.’”

On the impact she wishes for it all to add up to:

“I want to finish the fight for gender equality. And I will tell you that the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done is Moms First. It is so hard. It’s so hard and a lot of people have tried and have been trying.

But I cannot tell you how much, I believe that this – childcare, pay equity, paid leave – is central to women’s equality. I literally say, ‘why am I even bothering to tell my students to get educated when they’re going to get into the workforce and just get pushed out the minute they choose to become a mother?’

At the same time, getting these changes in place is not rocket science. So, it’s ironic. It’s not climate change, but it is climate change. It’s not as hard to move and shift behavior. It’s a policy change, but it’s so challenging for this country to move along and say, ‘yes, we must do this.’”

On the necessary cultural pivot:

“We’ve been indoctrinated to think that women are the problem or even men are the problem. Men are not even part of this conversation. They’re not the ones standing in the way of us getting our benefits or getting these support mechanisms. It’s a cultural change that we have to make. It’s the shift to seeing that childcare is an economic issue, not a personal issue – that in and of itself. If we started to say that childcare is not a personal problem that we have to solve. It is literally an economic issue that the country has to fix. If you made that one change, it would move mountains in terms of women’s economic freedom.

I think we have to decide, though, are women in the workforce a nice to have or a must-have? Nearly 60% of Americans still believe that one parent should stay at home with a child. So, that’s the cultural impediment that you’re trying to move. I always say a perfect world is where women have the choice to move in and out of the workforce with freedom. But it’s not even possible anymore to live in a one-income household. We’re almost living in the 1950s with that idea, when it was, but it’s not possible anymore.

So, if it’s not possible, knowing that, if we were to create society from scratch today, we would create a very different society. I was talking to a behavioral economist who was saying you would create more options for part-time work that was satisfying and fulfilling that paid well. You would think about this differently.

But it’s almost like we’re refusing to think about this differently. Even with the pandemic and how much society refused to accept remote work. I think something like 66% of employers are now back in the office even though we learned that flexibility was actually good for families. But the resistance towards doing something new is radical. That’s why what I am trying to do right now is so ambitious – because the headwinds against change are so strong in this country. But that has to change.”

To read more from Reshma Saujani, follow her on social media @ReshmaSaujani

Interviewed by Aimee Hansen