Her new book, “Pay Up” — a battle cry for working moms to get their due — calls on companies and policymakers to step up.
Reshma Saujani is over unpaid motherhood (I mean, aren’t we all?). Like so many of us, the activist, attorney, author of Brave, Not Perfect, and founder of Girls Who Code hit a wall during the pandemic while caring for her two young children and trying to stay on top of work. In her new book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think), she describes her “meltdown moment” as one spent in the fetal position on the rug in her son’s room, burned out to a crisp, exhaustion dragging her bones so heavily, she was almost oblivious to the stray Lego that was digging into her face.
Adding to her exhaustion was a feeling of hopelessness. She was suddenly on triple duty with a baby, a kindergartener, and a career, and the cracks of what she describes as her “girlboss” veneer caused a tectonic shift. Reading that millions of women, forced to choose between childcare and their jobs during the pandemic, were opting to flee the workforce made her even more resolute in her mission. She penned an op-ed for The Hill about “the Marshall Plan for Moms,” a phrase that’s a nod toward the U.S.-initiated post-WWII program to lift European agriculture and industry out of ruin. Saujani’s words eventually launched a movement-as-legislation endorsed by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tammie Duckworth and celebs like Eva Longoria and Amy Schumer that pushes for specific public- and private-sector changes that would help to expand choices for women and remove barriers to equality. Among them: A $2,400 monthly stimulus payment to compensate mothers for their unpaid home labor.
Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think)
Credit: Atria/One Signal Publishers
“I was just pissed,” Saujani tells Shondaland. “I was like, ‘Where’s the plan?’ I think the reason the numbers started to really bother me was because of what I’d seen, in terms of women being edged out of industry, with Girls Who Code,” she says, referring to her learning that girls trained in Saujani’s program didn’t land in tech careers as often as hoped. “What people forget,” she continues, “is in the 1980s we were almost at gender parity in tech, then we started pushing women out. So similarly, here, the large exodus of women leaving the workforce terrified me because there was no plan to bring them back.”
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
When Saujani’s op-ed went viral, the comments section enlightened her to the mixed thoughts held by both men and women. “For the first time, I was like, ‘Wow, motherhood is really controversial!’ Some people on the left were like, ‘What about the dads?’ even though they weren’t losing any money or jobs — in fact, they were gaining jobs. People on the right were like, ‘Motherhood is a choice,’ so you don’t get help from the government, or from your employers, or quite frankly, from anyone else. That’s what lit the match on me because I, for the first time, saw working motherhood as a gnarly problem that needed fixing.”
Saujani rightfully takes issue with how long we women have been told to fix a problem that isn’t ours to fix. “Every women’s-leadership book, from Confidence Code to Lean In, is all about something’s wrong with you,” Saujani explains. “If only you did the power pose. If only you raised your hand. If only you got a mentor, you would be fine. You would get equality. When those things didn’t happen, we were like, ‘What’s wrong with us? What am I doing wrong?’ when in reality, it’s never been about us. We’ve never been set up to succeed because workplaces have never been designed for us for our dual identities as mothers and as workers. We’ve always been working two-and-a-half jobs without any support.”
So, Saujani wrote her next book, Pay Up, which is a carefully considered combo of honest sisterly venting, comprehensive, well-researched policy suggestions, and a call to arms for women to fight for what they deserve. In its pages, she shares moments of vulnerability she’s personally experienced, some of which, she admits, weren’t easy to cop to. “When I talk about the industrial complex of corporate feminism, I was a part of that,” she says. “I’d be at conferences and would wave my hand like, ‘It’s all good; just work harder!’ Admitting how wrong I was, and how much I helped push that agenda, was hard. I had more miscarriages than I could count before I had my first baby, Shaan. I saw him 30 minutes a day. Every big moment of his life — his first steps, his first crawl — I got on video from my husband because I was on a plane all the time. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and being like, this is the price that you pay for changing the world. I would justify it to myself. That’s very painful because I would have lived the first six years of his life making very different choices. I now opt to do things virtually because I’m not going to miss out. I don’t embrace girlboss culture for myself or for others in the way that I have before.”
Before having kids, Saujani actually thought she was going to “have it all,” but it didn’t take too long after her first child was born for her to realize the idea was, well, bulls--t. “I thought that I had orchestrated everything in my favor by marrying the right person at the right time in my career. I had crafted it,” she admits. “Right after I had the first baby, I took leave, and my husband didn’t, and suddenly my to-do list was huge, and his was smaller. I was constantly exhausted. That’s when doing the two-and-a-half jobs began. To be honest, I was shocked — I think a lot of us were shocked — because we had thought that we had gotten these fifty-fifty partners.”
It was then she recognized, when it came to private sector and government support for working mothers, denying or limiting parental leave for men can promote imbalanced domestic-duty precedents at home. “One-third of divorces are because of the chores — it’s America’s dirty secret,” says Saujani. “Corporate policies exacerbate inequality at home — paid leave is an example of that. If you have two different paid-leave policies for mothers and fathers, or if you gaslight men when they take paid leave, you are literally promoting gender inequality at home. The hardest thing is going to be getting gender-neutral paid-leave policies and getting companies to incentivize men to take leave — not because men don’t want to take it, but because companies don’t want to push the lever on that. But we have to!”
Adding to the insult of unpaid domestic labor shouldered by women is what Saujani calls the “motherhood penalty,” or the wage gap between women and men that becomes a chasm should a woman step out of the workforce for any length of time to care for her kids. “We assume, when a woman becomes a mother, she is no longer interested in her career, or that her performance is going to suffer,” Saujani explains. “This is one of the most pervasive things that happens when women leave the workforce after having a child. When they come back, they lose huge percents of their salary.”
This is why Saujani is advocating for a future where parents can move in and out of the workforce without penalty, and for subsidized childcare so parents can work. “Childcare isn’t a personal problem; it’s an economic issue,” she relates. “Almost three out of 10 American families are run by single moms. They literally cannot work at their fullest capacity if we don’t pay for childcare. Childcare can be more expensive than a mortgage [and] is the largest cost center for families. The government needs to intervene, but if they don’t, the private sector needs to.”
As a jaded Gen-Xer with near-adult children who was all but forced into the flexibility of freelance (and its lack of benefits) due to exorbitant childcare costs, I ask Saujani what it’s going to take for this desperately needed sea change to finally take hold. “I say this is the new resistance. Just like when we put our pink hats on and marched in 2017 , we need to do the same thing right now and march into the workplace,” she says. “We’re all literally on fire right now, feeling the burden of this pandemic and the upending of our lives and our children’s lives. We have this kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the workplace because of the Great Resignation. There are so many open jobs, we actually have leverage. The fear of retribution that used to prevent a woman from asking to work remotely Thursdays and Fridays, or leave to take her kids to a doctor’s appointment, or support for mental health because you’d get fired or wouldn’t get promoted — today, you can just go somewhere else. Young people are asking for a 60 percent increase in their salaries and the corner office. They know that they have leverage and power.”
What about working moms who work in retail, administration, or even middle management? “I would tell all those women in the corner office, don’t just ask for yourself — ask for everybody. We can’t make the mistakes we’ve made in the past, just advocating for ourselves and leaving our sisters that are working hourly-wage jobs in retail, health care, and education behind. We have to have a wholesale change of the system. For hourly workers, subsidizing childcare includes also means predictability over your schedule, because if you work an hourly job in retail, you go get a babysitter, you show up at Walmart, and your shift is canceled — now you’re out the money. That happens every single minute of the day. I always say the workplace should be designed for a woman of color who is a single mother. I designed Girls Who Code for a girl who worked at a refugee camp, didn’t have Wi-Fi at home, and didn’t have a device. When you design and build for the most vulnerable, you design for everybody. We’ve designed workplaces for white men who have a stay-at-home partner, so they work for nobody.” She adds that men, especially younger men, want these changes in policy as much as women do but face resistance from older CEOs because the old ways have been to their benefit.
Pay Up also keeps it real when addressing mental-health issues and motherhood exacerbated by “the rug rat race,” or professional women who work tirelessly and competitively at furthering their children’s education and social status. “We’ve sold women a lie,” says Saujani. “It’s been a massive disservice to the feminist cause. We’ve created, quite frankly, a mental-health crisis. The anxiety that girlboss culture has created: What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I making it? Because it looks like she’s making it over there.” She also addresses the perils of “performative parenting,” or social-media representations of parenting that only convey perfection. “It doesn’t encourage people to live authentically,” she remarks. “When you see people going on vacation, it looks like they’re having the most amazing time, when in reality most people’s family vacations are just botched.”
As much as a doom-and-gloom portrait has seemingly been painted about women in the workforce, now that Pay Up is out in the world, Saujani is very optimistic. “We’re creating a movement, one company at a time, one reader at a time. I’ve been blown away by the response. I think women are ready for a new resistance, and, you know, I am always a woman on a mission and never give up.”