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 $ 2,400 Marshall Plan for Mothers. monthly checks to mothers for unpaid work do so at home. The announcement, signed by 50 well-known women, including Women’s March leaders and actresses Eva Longoria, Gabrielle Union and Amy Schumer, also called on Biden to approve policies that address parental leave, the affordable child care and pay equity. as policies that help recycle women who have dropped out of the workforce and help reopen schools safely.
Now, a month later, Saujani and Girls Who Code have posted 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, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.
“As partners and parents, we need to start doing our part at home,” the Washington Post ad states. “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 have been three times more likely than fathers to take on most household chores and child care in the opposite sex, according to a September report released by Lean In and McKinsey & Company. This overwhelming responsibility to juggle the care and full-time work of children has led to extreme exhaustion of many working mothers, who experts say are one of the main contributors to the more than 2.3 million women who have abandoned the labor force. since February 2020. As a result of this massive outflow, the female labor force participation rate reached a minimum of more than 30 years in January 2021, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris they referred 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 people. So the whole system And the reason we call it The Marshall Plan for Mothers is because a Marshall Plan was to think big and not think small, and if we want to better rebuild the United States, we have to to better rebuild motherhood “
Saujani’s proposal is named after the Marshall Plan enacted by the U.S. in 1948 to provide financial relief 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 women that women’s work counts,” she says, “and that their dreams and careers don’t go away. they have to take it for granted. So it’s a populist mothers’ movement. “
Although Biden has proposed to parents a tax credit of up to $ 3,600 per year to their parents in their $ 1.9 trillion Covid assistance plan, Saujani says his proposal is just a “down payment. of a Marshall Plan for Mothers ”.
“It will put money into mothers who need it,” she says of Biden’s plan. “But that’s not the 360 plan we need and we can’t just stop here. We have to pass legislation like paid leave, affordable childcare and pay equity.”
Similarly, she says Senator Mitt Romney’s proposal to pay parents up to $ 4,200 a year is also a “down payment” that does not provide 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 try to balance work life and unpaid work from domestic life. Now, she says, “you see me on the Zoom screen with my 5-year-old son and my baby and you see how much unpaid labor I make in my life.” And even with that visibility, he says he doesn’t trust companies to hire mothers and create more equitable jobs for them to thrive. “They will penalize us even more,” he says. “So what do we do about it? How do we cope? [companies] responsible? “
Although Saujani has received criticism about her Marshall Plan for Mothers, including that it will only encourage more women to leave the workplace, that it will encourage more parents to be away from work and that it excludes parents who are also primary caregivers. . the setback has not made him change his mind to focus on policies that specifically benefit mothers.
“I think all caregivers matter, but not all caregivers face a penalty for being parents,” she says. “Mothers face a maternity penalty. And I think there’s a difference between the approach and the solution. We’re focused on mothers because we have a history of not valuing mothers. It doesn’t mean we’re excluding other caregivers. “.
In addition to mothers being responsible for most household chores, mothers are also twice as likely as fathers to worry that their work performance will be judged negatively by their responsibilities to care for during the pandemic. as reported by Lean In and McKinsey & Company.
“I’m also experiencing it as CEO of Girls Who Code,” says Saujani, who announced this month that she will step down as CEO in April. “People always ask themselves,‘ Shouldn’t Reshma learn to code all the kids? Why focus on girls? “Well, we focused on the girls because we had a huge gap in terms of women and women of color who were part of the tech staff. And if we didn’t call her Girl Who Code, we wouldn’t have focused on girls and no No I have created programs aimed at getting them into the program [tech] labor force. And we wouldn’t have started a conversation about why. “
As with the Marshall Plan for Mothers, Saujani says his approach is not just to create programs and policies that will benefit mothers, but he also wants to start a conversation about “How did this happen?”
“In this crisis, we have a chance,” he adds. “And I often feel like women we always ask for the least controversial … And I think now we have a chance to put it all on the table, for everything.”
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