In January, Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani published a full-page ad in The New York Times asking President Biden and the rest of Congress to approve his Marshall Plan for mothers, which includes $ 2,400 in monthly checks to mothers for unpaid work they do at home. The announcement, which was signed by 50 high-profile women, including leaders of the Women’s March and actresses Eva Longoria, Gabrielle Union and Amy Schumer, also called on Biden to approve policies that address parental leave, affordable childcare and equal pay, also as policies that help retrain women who have left the labor market 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, Craiglist founder Craig Newmark and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
“As partners and parents, we need to start doing our part at home,” says The Washington Post ad. “Like most employers, we also need to create more protections and flexibilities for working mothers, and end the ‘maternity penalty’ that punishes them for exercising it.”
During the pandemic, mothers were three times more likely than fathers to take on most household chores and childcare in opposite sex relationships, according to a September report released by Lean In and McKinsey & Company . This overwhelming responsibility to reconcile child care and full-time work has led to extreme exhaustion for many working mothers, which experts say is an important contribution to the more than 2.3 million women who have left the workforce since February 2001. 2020. As a result of With this massive departure, the female labor force participation rate reached its lowest level in more than 30 years in January 2021, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris referring to this crisis as a “national emergency”.
“All the mothers I know are at their breaking point,” Saujani told CNBC Make It, “because when schools closed, we became teachers, babysitters and support staff. So the whole system is broken. And the reason for what we call the Marshall Plan for mothers is because a Marshall Plan was about thinking big and not thinking small. And if we’re going to rebuild the United States better, we have to rebuild motherhood better. “
Saujani’s proposal is named after the Marshall Plan that the US enacted in 1948 to provide financial relief to Western European countries after the devastating impact of World War II.
“This is important to me, as the founder of Girls Who Code, because we have to send a signal to our girls and boys that women’s work counts,” she says, “and that their dreams and careers should not be taken for granted. So, this is a populist movement of mothers. “
Although Biden proposed a child tax credit of up to $ 3,600 a year for parents in his $ 1.9 trillion Covid aid plan, Saujani says his proposal is just an “initial payment for a Marshall Plan for mothers “.
“This will put money in the hands of mothers in need,” she says of Biden’s plan. “But this is not the 360 plan we need and we cannot just stop there. We have to pass laws like paid leave, affordable childcare and equal pay.”
Likewise, she says that Senator Mitt Romney’s proposal to pay parents up to $ 4,200 a year is also an “entry” that does not offer 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 that mothers were struggling to try to balance work and unpaid work at home. Now, she says, “you see me on the Zoom screen with my 5 year old son and baby and see how much unpaid work I deal with in my life”. And even with that visibility, she says she doesn’t believe that companies will take on hiring mothers and creating fairer workplaces for them to thrive. “We will be penalized even more,” she says. “So, what are we doing about it? How are we holding on [companies] responsible?”
Although Saujani received criticism of his Marshall Plan for mothers – including that it will only encourage more women to leave the workplace, that it will encourage more fathers to stay away from home and that it excludes parents who are also the primary caregivers – she says the resistance did not change her mind about focusing on policies that specifically benefit mothers.
“I think that all caregivers matter, but not everyone faces a penalty for being parents,” she says. “Mothers face the penalty of motherhood. And I think there is a difference between focus and solution. We are focused on mothers because we have a history of not valuing them. This does not mean that we are excluding other caregivers.”
In addition to mothers being responsible for most household chores, mothers are also twice as likely as fathers to be concerned that their job performance is being judged negatively because of their care responsibilities during the pandemic, reports Lean In and McKinsey & Company.
“I also experience this as the CEO of Girls Who Code,” said Saujani, who announced this month that he will step down as CEO in April. “People are always asking, ‘Shouldn’t Reshma all children learn to program? Why focus on girls? ‘ Well, we focused on girls because we had a big gap in terms of black women and women who were in the tech workforce. And if we didn’t call it Girls Who Code, we wouldn’t have focused on the girls and we wouldn’t have created programs that aimed to get them on [tech] workers. And we wouldn’t have started a conversation about why. “
In the same way with the Marshall Plan for mothers, Saujani says that her focus is not only on creating programs and policies that will benefit mothers, but she also wants to start a conversation about, “How did this happen?”
“In this crisis, we have an opportunity”, he adds. “And I often feel that, as women, we always ask for the least controversial thing … And I think we now have the opportunity to put everything on the table, for everything.”
Output check: The female participation rate in the workforce reached its lowest level in 33 years in January, according to a new analysis
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