We sing everybody's life on the same screen. You've seen my son, interrupt me a hundred times. You see my bedroom where I work and I think in the beginning, a lot of us were turning off our video and muting the sound because we knew intellectually that we are going to pay the cost of you. Seeing our mothering,
I'm Carly's a chicken.
And I'm Danielle Weisberg, welcome to skim from the couch. This podcast is where we go deep on Career advice from women who have lifted from the good stuff like hiring and growing a team to the rough stuff like negotiating, your salary and giving or getting hard feedback, we started the skin from a couch. So, what better place to talk it all out, then where it began on a couch
Welcome to our Mother's Day episode of skimmed from the couch. Our Guest today is Rush, mr. Johnny, she is the founder of girls who code and today we're going to talk about working moms over the past year, we have seen just how devastating this pandemic has been for women who are losing their jobs and dropping out of the labor force. At alarming numbers, reshma has proposed a Marshall Plan for moms to get women back to work and to create
Stainable solutions for working women in the future reshma. Thank you so much for coming back on the couch with us today. This is actually your second time on the show first. I think that's the first time we've ever had anyone twice. So a lot of a lot of history happening but really, really excited to dig in here excited to be here. You know, I love everything you're doing and I'm so excited to chat with you. Thank you. Well, first of all, as we kind of set up here, just now we just spent 10 minutes both like moving location.
Ian's setting up our Zoom changing headphones changing voice note record. How are you like, how is this year been for you? You know, it's been rough, right? It's been rough and I think we're in this strange moment now where, you know, there's a shift but I think everybody, I know, feels really off and having a hard time like readjusting to whatever that new normal is and I've been like, you know, meditating on it and I think for me it's just I don't feel as much
Motivated as I felt before, I need an adrenaline rush, you know, I think working with my kids under my feet, I feel like I just need to be at in a space in a place where I don't constantly have sensory overload because that's really what I'm struggling with. Yeah. And also you mentioned your kids as we were setting up here, you know, I feel like we've all lost sense of time but it feels like at least for me, you'd like just had your youngest child. Honestly, if you had told me, he was three months old. They be like yeah, you just had him
But you just informed me. He's now, 14 months old which is basically as long as we've been home, how have your two kids adjusted differently because you have your oldest is like five right? Yeah. So let my oldest is 6. Now it turns 6 just recently and you know we've had like two days of in-person school sometimes one sometimes, none. So he's been you know, on Zoom school for most of the, like his for all of his kindergarten and that has been rough. He's loved it because he's a little bit of an introvert and
The idea of being able to like do school in his pajamas, go downstairs, and get his banana muffin and have like, Mommy and Daddy everywhere is amazing sucks for us. I think my littlest one who is now 14 months, this is all he's known. And so, you know, he never got to be passed around from Human to human last week. I took him to a music class in the Park. Yeah, I mean for like the first time, you know, he's got no friends. By the time, Sean was 14 months, like he had a whole crew in the neighborhood.
Sighs got nothing. So I think it's been a really, really, really strange year. But I do believe that children are resilient, so I think I'm having a harder time. Quite frankly than either. One of them are your career has been really marked by how you look to solve the gender gap in Tech. But now you're really looking to improve the gender gap for working parents. I want you to sort of set the stage for us. What have you been observing, nationally and anecdotally that has led you to take this on? Yeah. So I didn't think I'd be
Doing this or fighting or building this movement, when I started 20, 20, I had just had a newborn baby that had baby via surrogate. So I was really looking forward to my maternity leave so I can actually bond with my son and the organization girls are close in a place where I might you know my trusted then CEO was going to like take it on. I was really not going to pick up the phone answer, an email do anything except like just like nest with my baby and then covid-19.
UND and I canceled, my maternity leave. When Psy was a few weeks old. I had to home-school my then five year old, and I had to save my Global girls nonprofit from an economic crisis. Because as, you know, when crisis has hit the first organizations to suffer are the ones that are serving women and girls and I got covid-19, but it barely registered because I was working 16 hours a day my liver failed. I got acne on my face as if I was 16 years old and I was
Just ending every day just done but, you know, Carly as I looked at my resume screen, every mom, every woman looks exactly how I felt. And as we talked about it, we all said you know what, let's grin and bear. It would September Comes in the schools open will have reprieve. Well, September came and it was less than two weeks. Notice we found out that schools are closed and someone a bunch of men came up with this hybrids, you know, model or
This is zoom School model, where the default caretaker which is an 86 percent of households, a woman. A mom, you know, was going to have to log her kid onto Zune at nine o'clock. Ten o'clock, eleven o'clock all the while, maintaining her full-time job and doing laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and everything else that came in between. And I think the thing that I felt at that moment was like, wow, like they didn't even think about us like as they, you know.
Heard at the cost of the HVAC equipment and keeping teachers safe, they never even thought about us. They never thought about. Well what are these mom's going to do? How are they going to maintain their Judgement Day? Cares are shut. You can't ask your grandparent to come over and look after your kid because we're in a middle of a global pandemic. And the thought that a decision could be made that. So, radically affected our lives and we wouldn't even be thought of terrified me. And so the next thought I had after like, what they
Yes. Was where's the plan like someone's got a plan right? Like, where's the plan? Because at that point, some of the numbers are trickling out. We saw that women's labor market participation was where it was in 1989 that we had lost 30 years of progress in nine months. And in fact, the December 2020, jobs report, all the jobs lost were women, all of them and there was no plan, the administration was putting out a plan. The Republicans were putting out a plan. The private sector was putting up and there was no plan.
And so I wrote an op-ed many ways out of anger and frustration, which is like we need a Marshall Plan for moms. And here's my idea of like the couple things, so we should offer mothers in this moment and the idea that campaign has gone viral and months later, we have two bills introduced in Congress, several bills introduced in the state. You know, we've ignited a national conversation and I think we'd like really tapped into this populist, mom's Rage, which are saying, you know,
no, we're not America social safety net. We do not work for free. There's so much in what you just said. First of all, I had no idea you would covid. So I'm so glad that you are doing okay now. And I think how you sort of began what you were saying, I'm just like the level of exhaustion. The level of exasperation is something that all of us can relate to in different capacities and have. All of us have been on a zoom with our colleagues. And I've seen that same look. Give us a brief skin primer on what the Marshall Plan.
Actually was so that people who maybe haven't done US history and in many years have a better idea of what you're referencing. So the Marshall Plan was put out after the war when the world was under siege. And, you know, we were fundamentally broken and Savage by World War II and it was the idea of like having a bold economic recovery plan to get Americans. Back to work was interesting is because we were sober lion and World War II on women's labor.
/ that plan included paid, sick days and included, some of the things that we're talking about now. So when I thought about like how I think many mothers felt in this moment with is that, that literally everything has been blown up around them. And if we're going to build America back better, we have to build motherhood back better. And so, what does that look like? And so as I like surveying my PTA moms, you know, and talk to the mothers and the working mothers in my life and civil? What do you need?
There, for five things, I kept hearing and the one thing was is we need cash. We need basic income payments from others, because every mother's situation at this moment was different, right? Like some moms needed money to pay the mortgage, some moms needed money to put food on the table. Some moms need money to pay for a tutor, right? But cash was a very important thing that many moms needed and we'll talk about the controversy of offering Mother's cash in a minute. The second thing I kept hearing was that the structural changes
Is in those were you know, paid sick days and affordable. Childcare, the United States is one of the few Nations that doesn't offer paid leave. And if you think about, if people had paid, leave and paid sick days in those early months in February and March, we wouldn't have lost as many of our fellow countrymen and women. And so living in a country where you sometimes, you have a child and you have to go back to work. The next day is insane. We also live in a nation where we don't have affordable, childcare, you know, my parents were right.
Juice. And I was a latchkey kid since I was 8 because they couldn't afford the $50 a week for child care. And so many parents and mothers at this moment are in the same boat, right? And they piece kind of childcare together so that, you know. So to make it work, the other piece of this plan was that one of the reasons why we lost those two point. Three million jobs is that many women mothers found themselves in jobs that weren't pandemic proof like retail. How
Health Care education and those jobs weren't coming back. And so, 70 percent of low-income families are run by single Breadwinners which are women and often women of color. When they lose their job, the entire family suffers. So we needed to have a plan to retrain those mothers. So the entire family doesn't fall into poverty. So you just head on what I was. My next question was which is I want to hear a little bit of what you really saw this past year around how single
And women of color in particular, are being affected by the state of our Workforce today. And then obviously, how the pandemic really brought that to light further. I mean, I think you're being devastated devastated. I mean, women of color lost twice as many jobs as white women you know, for single moms who have like again, no social safety, net to support them. When crisis is like this happened, there barely hanging on and they're at they're being asked every day.
To make sacrifices that are just unfair. I've talked to single moms who were studying to be a nurse and they were over driving on the side, and when the school is shut down, they had no choice, right? But to like, let go of their dreams to take care of their kids because every mom will always choose four children over her. And what's interesting, Carly is we nerd out on these numbers and talk about these numbers. We never talk about who are through swimming, what were their dreams
No, when I wrote this app bad, it was so crazy because I got hit on the right and the left. And it's really it was really interesting about what people were saying about, what the visceral feeling, what about it was. So on the right people were saying, well, we don't need a Marshall Plan for moms because mother has a choice. When you become a mom, you don't get any nice things you do. You mean you don't get child care? You don't get affordable daycare. You get nothing. It's your problem. And we live in this kind of country, with like rugged, individualism,
Where we think again like we don't have to support you and we don't we don't recognize on that sense is that we had 300,000 less births this year in a society that doesn't produce children doesn't produce. The next generation is a failing society and so it we do have to think about what we are offering and supporting parents on the left. The criticism was well, if you pay mothers, they won't go back to work and it was really that kind of critique.
That I found really interesting and then I'm starting to kind of dig into and writing more about, is this idea about this? Real reluctance is historical reluctance about valuing unpaid labor because in many ways are worth as women. As feminists is only worth anything in the workplace and I think that that is wrong. Well, I want to dig into that because you know I read a lot of the the criticism that came out after your up Ed and
One of which was that you know what you just touched on is like we shouldn't have to pay a woman to be a mother and that that felt to people like something out of like the 1950s. We're saying like she's the breadwinner saying, she's getting a seat at the table. She's the vice president. And then now we're saying, no, she's the mom at home and I'm really curious. Like, what was your reaction to that? I was shocked, but not surprised, right? Because remember I'm the one who's sort of girls who code.
And when I started girls who code and I'm sure you face this to Carly, it was a Hawaiian girls. Why not everybody should boys, learn how to code? And I spent years explaining that, yes, but we have to fix the problem as it is and meet the world as it is and not the way that we want it to be and simply by quote, calling it Marshall Plan for parents
Doesn't acknowledge the fact that 86 percent of household work is done by mother's. Doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of kids that have been affected in. This pandemic are young black girls who have not been able to log on to school because they've been asked to do housework and caretaking so it's like invariably these responsibilities always fall on women and to think that that doesn't have consequences.
On us, raise your hand for that promotion studying to be that nurse going to college is just crazy. And I think that like the opportunity that we have here in the conversation that I want to have is we spent a lot of time, a lot of hbr articles on like, how women can succeed in the work and why they need a mentor and a sponsor. And, but we really haven't spent a lot of time talking about how do we get to 50/50 in the home?
And until we do, what support are we willing to give mothers in this moment, in this time while we change our social norms while we change our laws, while we change culture?
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Sent off
today.
You've rattled off a lot of stats that are, you know, many of which I've read in summer, which I hadn't heard of all the stats that you've read and research this past year, which one stands out to you. The most is just the most staggering, you know what terrifies me the most is the fact that our labor market participation is where it was in 1989 in the reason why I say that is, you know, I started girls who code because I wanted to get to gender parity in the workforce and what we forget about women in coding and women in engineering is we were almost at parody in
1980s in the 1980s. 37% of the technology, Workforce was female and I know that. Yep, what I started girls who code was 18? And now we've slowly climbed to 22. So when you lose that kind of ground, it's not an on and off switch. I mean, you know, you and I we've done so much work to get more women in Tech to get more kids in Tech and it's still a slow, slow, slow walk. So similarly here when people
Talk about all the ways we had a vaccine you know, we're going to open up the schools, everything's gonna be great, it's not true. The loss of we have suffered as women in the workforce is horrifying and horrible and as an entrepreneur, you know, unless you got some kpi's. I mean unless you got me a business plan of exactly how we're going to get back. We are not going to get back for 30, 40, 50 years at best.
My heart is racing. Listening to you say this, you mentioned that there are a number of bills with lawmakers right now. Do you think like that there actually will be a Marshall Plan past for moms? Like, what do you think is going to be the next step that will help accelerate that recovery so that we don't have to eat 30 to 40 years. What's funny? I mean, one of the things that I've been saying to the White House for a while now it's just just say the word just say mother's just say, mom's just acknowledge.
Who has borne the brunt of this pandemic because you can't fix something. Unless you acknowledge it. And I do think that the language has shifted and the the focus on women in the focus on mother's has shifted and I really applaud this Administration for having a big Vision you know, and talking about cares infrastructure and I think the work that we not have to do and everybody listening to this conversation he's do regardless of whether your mother because it affects you because one day you might become a mother or you have a mother or your
I might be a mother or your aunt whoever right? It affects all of us men and women parents and non-parents is that we just have to think boldly and we have to ask for it all and that means that we have to shift structures meaning. We need to have a system where we do have affordable childcare and it's not crazy. Estonia, has it Norway, has it, Sweden, has it, Germany, has it, there are places where you have a child and you get diapers and milk, you know, and then and you can stay home for a couple years and guess.
What when you come back, you are welcomed into the workforce. We know that. When you even take a year off, you lose almost 39 percent of your income that we have. In again, in this culture. We have, there's so many and we need to fix this about AI that when you apply for a job and immediately you know, a I says oh you're gone out, your resume is spit out. So there's so many like again norms and changes and shifts that we have to make two kind of normalize this. And so there's a lot that we have
Fine of us. And I think that we have to hit it on all fronts. We had a hip had hit it on policy, which is what the by demonstration is doing. We got a hit and culture, you know, we have to shift what it means to be a mother and the cultural conversation around and Mom can't be martyr anymore, you know? And we have to shift the workplace. Like we know there's a motherhood penalty we know as we're that only 7% of American dad's take parental leave so it doesn't matter if you offer it. But you work, at Goldman Sachs in, we want the guy who's you know taking his kid to little league but if you take part
Totally forget about making MD. And that's exactly what's happening, right? And work places all across the country. So I do think there's a lot of work to do. I'm hopeful because I think that this is opened up a conversation that we can have. I want to talk Beyond policy and you've mentioned in the past, the motherhood penalty that women face at work and you sort of were just referencing. It, can you just better explain like what that actually means? Yeah, I mean I think from a paper,
I think it's like 17 cents on every dollar that a father makes over a mother for the exact same job. I think they say when we have a fatherhood premium we want to hire Dad's but we have motherhood penalties. I'm sure a lot of folks listening to his call have been asked when he planning to have kids. Are you planning to have kids? Like and that's not seen as a good thing that's seen. As I got to know if I'm gonna hire you, you know, one of the things that I think I get nervous about in this moment is, as you've seen, we've seen everybody's life on the same screen. You've seen my
son, interrupt me a hundred times. You see my bedroom where I work, and I think in the beginning, a lot of us were turning off our video and muting the sound because we knew intellectually that we were going to pay the cost of you seeing our mothering. And, you know, I really question whether now that you've seen my life and the work that I do, the extra, unvalued unpaid labor that I do at home. Whether employers are walking around right now, being
I gotta hire a mom by the way, great cue that your baby is crying right now. I see it. Good multitasking. I know I think that it is daunting, like everything you're saying. I'm like, sitting here like a nodding as as an executive I'm nodding as just a woman in business. I'm nodding as a woman. And I'm also nodding as someone who doesn't have a family yet. But like, I hope to one day and it's daunting to think about how do you create change an
System. Now, obviously, if you're in a position to be an executive, there are policy changes you can make within your own company. And that's something at the skim Danielle and I, you know, really tried to create a company with policies that reflected where we would want to work. But if you're not an executive, if you're listening to this like what are the steps that we can each take to help in this to help get rid of this? Not so invisible penalty and kind of the unspoken Asura round it? Yeah, I mean, you know, we're going to be putting out of
Plan for moms at work and I've been, we've been thinking and talking a lot about like, as we're thinking about what the new normal is. What does that look like? And when you do policies that benefit mom's, I think you have policies that benefit everyone, right? And I do think we have to move towards a world where we offer subsidized childcare. It's kind of crazy right? That we pay to freeze your eggs but when you have your children, we don't offer much support. So I think we have to get to a place where we're thinking,
About both sides of pendulum. Because the data is clear that when you invest in Early Education, that's good for society. So it's good for all of us for those who are currently a working parent, Mom, Dad. However, they identified and they feel like they are struggling right now because everyone is at home and everyone is dealing with all different sorts of stress. How would you advise them to communicate their needs to their bosses or colleagues? I think that we have to organize around up. We have to be Collective weird. To be honest about what it is that we need. And then we have
Talking to one another. Like I do, think Mom should be organizing parents should be organized and together at the workplace and coming up with their ideas of what they think that they need. What's your flexibility look like what should remote working look like? Do we need to have different hours? What are the types of benefits that we think are attractive? I think we hold a lot of power right now as mothers and as parents. And I think that we just have to be really clear in asking for it and recognizing to, you know, the other thing Carly, I've been thinking a lot about is one of the other changes is we should be getting compensated.
And for the unpaid labor that we do at work, who are the ones that are organizing, the dni sessions, who are the ones that are organizing, the book clubs, who is organizing the speaker's women, people of color. But when it comes time to promotion, are those things that your employer looks at and says, you know what, I'm going to give you a raise because you organize the holiday Christmas party and that means that you've really helped build our culture. So I think that it's just a moment for us to rebuild things back. Look at our work places, you know, and figure out like what do we need?
Be successful. And what do we need to be healthy? I mean the other thing that I really want us to really push and have a conversation on. Is this unpaid leave Ur? What can companies actually do to encourage more gender parity in the home? Are we celebrating men when they come into the office on the Monday meeting and be like, I spend my weekend doing loads of laundry, you know, and actually just, again encouraging us to get out of the existing gender norms and create something that's just
Just different and more equal and more. Just so, for those of us, who whether we're a manager or just a colleague and don't have kids yet, what are the questions that we should be asking of our colleagues of our employees who are parents, are at how we can best support. I think it's, how are you doing? What do you need? How can I support you? And I think it's being genuine about it, right? Because in some ways, I think, what's
Is in the beginning, people were really supportive and now we're kind of over it, right? And I think it is really about recognizing and understanding, and it being okay with the fact that parents are dealing with a different burden right now, we're all suffering. We're also, you know, what time it is? We're all struggling. It's a hard time especially for our mental health and it's okay. That one segment of our community is facing a little even more.
Stress, even more anxiety. And that doesn't take away anything from you or, you know, if you don't have a child, if you're not a parent, because again, I think if we build more empathy, if we build a culture that, you know, again, like I say a Sisterhood that is supporting people who are going through it. I think you just got to Build a Better Community for everyone. You mentioned a few minutes ago, he said the words mental health, everything you're talking about sort of
As a crisis this year kind of, underneath all of that is we're also in a mental health crisis. How have you personally navigated this this past year? I think we're all, you know, trying to find sanity in different ways and what has been helpful for you. My mental health is not been great part of it, is because I've always prided myself on having a very strong mental composition. Like, I'm the one everyone's, like, I don't know how you do it reshma, you know, five, miscarriages. I didn't even know, right? Like I do.
Deal with dealt with a lot of trauma and I'm able to rebound. And so I have especially over the past year. I've been to three o'clock in the morning, phone call. You know, my friends who are going through divorces or suffering from addiction. I'm the person they call. So I'm often carrying so much and I would say it sometimes, I feel like I spend half my days and nights being a therapist and I take pride in that identity to, but I do feel like especially recently, it's really it's
It's getting to me.
And I've been trying to figure out like, what are my, you know, I'll I'm, I'm an athletic person. So, I think really being sacred about my workouts in the morning being sacred about my night, routines, my humidifier, and my magnesium oil, and my CBD gum. He's right. But I have to constantly check in with myself into like tell people. Hey, you know, I'm kind of feeling sad. We have dinner with me or like, you know, you don't watch a movie with me like or to my son. I need that extra snuggle, right.
Because I think, even for someone like me who, again, Prides himself on having a very strong mental composition. It's been rough. It's interesting. You know, we started this podcast, we mentioned the word resilience and I have found in this past year and talking just to friends and colleagues, we said, oh well, kids are really resilient or like I'm really resilient and I think it's almost like a scapegoat of like, be resilient. You'll be fine. And not actually bringing to the surface of like no, like
This is not normal what we're all going through, and we all are having really bad days and really bad moments. And I'm curious if there is something that you learned about yourself this year, as you know, a woman who's the CEO of many things and many movements that just surprised you the most. So I've got to learn so much about myself. You know, II did something really hard this year? I decided to step down as CEO of girls who code and that was not the plan.
When I started the beginning of the year, I've always felt like I was it was I was in the timetable like I was going to step off whether it was this your next year, but I was really feeling like, as I was looking at the world crashing down that I needed to make a change, you know? And I've learned in making that change that changes hard. That I was accustomed to a certain life in a schedule. And I part of her, I thrive on habit and rituals and so like taking myself out of that.
For sound was terrifying, but really necessary for those of us listening, like, what is the one step that each of us can take to help this movement? I think, you know, don't be afraid to tear it all down and build it back up, like, think out of the box, if you were a mom, you know? If you're not a mom, if you were a mom, what would you want? And if you are a mom and you're angry, and you're
Frustrated and you're tired. What do you need? And if you're an ally, what can you do, differently? What's your role? And changing gender Norms about who does what? I'm going to move into our, our lightning round. You've done this before Rapidfire, you're ready? Yes. Okay. Morning person or night owl morning last TV, show you binge-watched. Who killed Sara? Oh, what's that murders
Up my alley. Tell me more and that Flex. Excellent. Binge watch it today. Oh done tonight. That's my plan. What is the most used app on your phone Spotify? What is a language? You wish you could speak French. First trip. You're going to book when everything comes down, Italy. What's your best? Work from home parenting? Hack M&M's right next to my workspace. Okay, we have a lot of comment restaurant. Thank you so much for the work you are doing, and congratulations, and just really happy to have you on
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for hanging out with us, join us next week for another episode of skin from the couch. And if you can't wait until then subscribe to our daily email newsletter. That gives you all the important news and information. You need to start your day, sign up at the scam.com. That's the SK. IMM.com two M's for a little something extra.
