In January, Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani ran a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging President Biden and the rest of Congress to promote their Marshall Plan for mothers, which includes $ 2,400 a month in checks to mothers for unpaid work do at home. The announcement, which was signed by 50 prominent women, including leaders of the Women’s March and actresses Eva Longoria, Gabrielle Union and Amy Schumer, also called on Biden to adopt policies to address parental leave, childcare at prices affordable and pay equity as policies that help retrain women who have left the workforce and policies that help reopen schools safely.
Now, a month later, Saujani and Girls Who Code have launched another full-page ad promoting the Marshall Plan for mothers. This time, the ad appears in The Washington Post and is signed by 50 male allies, including NBA player Steph Curry, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
“As partners and fathers, we need to start sharing at home,” the Washington Post said. “As a majority of employers, we need to create even more protections and flexibility for working mothers and end the ‘maternity punishment’ that punishes them for exercising it.”
During the pandemic, mothers were three times more likely for fathers to take over most household chores and child care in the opposite sex, according to a September report published by Lean In and McKinsey & Company. This overwhelming responsibility to juggle child care and full-time work has led to the extreme exhaustion of many working mothers, who experts say contribute greatly to the more than 2.3 million women who left the workforce in February. 2020. As a result of this mass exit, the female labor force participation rate reached a low level of over 30 years in January 2021, with President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris referring to this crisis as “an emergency. national level ”.
“Every mother I know is on the verge of breaking up,” Saujani told CNBC Make It, “because when schools closed, we became teachers, nannies, and support people. So the whole system is broken. And “The reason we call it a Marshall Plan for moms is because a Marshall Plan was to think big and not think small. And if we want to rebuild America better, we need to rebuild motherhood better.”
Saujani’s proposal is named after the Marshall Plan adopted by the US in 1948 to provide financial aid to Western European countries after the devastating impact of World War II.
“This matters to me as the founder of Girls Who Code, because we need to send a signal to our girls and boys that women’s work matters,” she says, “and that their dreams and careers should not be taken for granted. So this is a populist mother movement. “
Although Biden has offered parents a child tax credit of up to $ 3,600 a year under his $ 1.9 trillion Covid aid plan, Saujani says his proposal is just an “advance payment for a Marshall Plan for mothers.” ”.
“She’ll put the money in the hands of mothers who need it,” she says of Biden’s plan. “But this is not the 360 plan we need and we can’t just stop here. We need to pass legislation like paid leave, affordable day care and pay equity.”
Similarly, she says Senator Mitt Romney’s proposal to pay parents up to $ 4,200 a year is also an “advance payment” that does not give working mothers and fathers all the support they need.
In early February, Congresswoman Grace Meng introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for the implementation of the Marshall Plan for mothers to “restore and revitalize mothers in the workforce.”
Even before the pandemic, Saujani says mothers were already struggling to balance work and unpaid work at home. Now, she says, “you see me on the Zoom screen with my 5-year-old baby and my baby and see how much unpaid work I do in my life.” And even with that visibility, she says she doesn’t trust companies to hire their mothers and create more equitable jobs for them to thrive. “We will be penalized even more,” she said. “So what do we do about it? How we hold [companies] responsible? “
Although Saujani has been criticized for his Marshall Plan for mothers – including the fact that he will only encourage more women to leave work, that he will encourage more fathers to leave home and that he will exclude fathers who are and primary caregivers, she says. the push did not make her change her mind about focusing on policies that specifically benefit mothers.
“I think all caregivers matter, but not all caregivers face punishment because they are parents,” she says. “Mothers face a punishment for motherhood. And I think there’s a difference between concentration and solution. We focus on mothers because we have a history of not valuing mothers. It doesn’t mean we exclude other caregivers.”
In addition to the fact that mothers are responsible for most of the housework, mothers are also twice as likely as fathers to worry that their professional performance is judged negatively because of their pandemic care responsibilities, Lean In and McKinsey & Company report. .
“I’m also experiencing this as the CEO of Girls Who Code,” said Saujani, who announced this month that he would step down as CEO in April. “People always ask, ‘Shouldn’t Reshma teach all children to code? Why focus on girls? “Well, we focus on girls, because we had a huge gap in terms of women and women of color who were in the technology workforce. And if we didn’t call it Girls Who Code, we wouldn’t focus on girls and we wouldn’t have created programs to introduce them to [tech] workforce. And we wouldn’t have started a conversation about why. “
Similar to the Marshall Plan for Mothers, Saujani says her focus is not only on creating programs and policies that benefit mothers, but she also wants to start a conversation about “How did this happen?”
“In this crisis, we have an opportunity,” she added. “And, many times I feel like women, we always ask for the least controversial thing … And I think now we have the opportunity to put everything on the table, for all this.”
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