Watch: Girls Who Code CEO Reshma Saujani on building a better support system for US women
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In 2020, American women lost 5.4 million jobs, with 2.5 million leaving the workforce completely—quadruple the rate of their male counterparts. Just a few weeks into her White House tenure, Vice President Kamala Harris referred to this alarming shift as a national emergency, and companies that agree are seeking and implementing solutions.
One such company is Girls Who Code; the nonprofit’s CEO Reshma Saujani recognizes the compounding factors of this crisis, including a lack of affordable daycare, economic disparities, and insufficient workplace emergency planning. To lessen some of this damage and prevent further setbacks, Saujani has proposed a Marshall Plan for Moms, in which she and other activists, executives, and celebrities call on the Biden administration to provide short-term monthly payments to mothers, pass paid leave and affordable daycare, and invest in retraining women for the jobs of the future.
When the private sector is coming up with solutions [to this national emergency] for their own workers, they need to advocate for their government to offer those solutions to everybody.
This episode of Make Business Better is more than a conversation between CEOs: first and foremost, it is a conversation between working parents about their personal and professional experiences juggling work, childcare, remote learning, and the rest of the pandemic fallout, and what can be done to ease the burden on all American parents.
Read more: The case for treating childcare like essential economic infrastructure
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