The Pandemic’s Toll on Working Moms

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, for the many women who climb all the way up the ladder but still can’t quite crack that ceiling, it is time for the workplace to pay up. That’s the title of author and activist Reshma Saujani’s new book, which addresses the burnout and inequity harming working women today. Saujani sat down with Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the ongoing misconceptions around feminism in the office.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane thanks. Reshma Saujani, thanks so much for joining us. What’s the last couple of years been like for moms? What does the data show us?

RESHMA SAUJANI, AUTHOR, “PAY UP”: I mean, the data shows us that we are burnt out and exhausted. You know, when we started the pandemic, you know, our mental health was in a good place. But now, it’s in the toilet. You know, we have seen this severe amount of job loss. You know, that’s not even accounting for the amount of women who down shifted their careers. You know, I’ve had women who say to me, you know, I was studying to be a nurse, I was saving up to do that. And now, I had to like put that dream aside, and I’m Uber driving right now just to pay the rent. They’re exhausted. They’re tired. And all they want is some help. Some recognition that they’ve fulfilled a patriotic duty over the past two years by keeping their families together and thereby, keeping this country together. So, they just want to be seen. They just want to be respected. They want to be valued. And I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for in this moment. It’s the right thing to do.

SREENIVASAN: You point out that — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the end of 2019, women actually had more payroll jobs, and despite things that are still structurally unequal, there were so many women in the workforce now in sure (ph) pandemic, what happens?

SAUJANI: Yes. When we started the pandemic with 51 percent of the labor force. And then, you know, we have the pandemic. And I know what happened for me and so many moms is that, you know, when schools closed, you know, that was really the breaking point for so many women. Because, so many families use schools as daycare. So, now, schools are closed. Half the daycare centers are shut down. You can’t rely on your elderly parents who may have been helping you kind of put it together. And so, you have no safety net. And your home schooling your kid while you’re trying to maintain your full-time job. And so, this was the breaking point for so many women. And you literally saw millions of women exit the workforce. You know, our labor market participation, you know, in that December of 2020 was back where it was in 1989, and we still have been recovered. And so, I wrote an op-ed. I said, we need a marshal time for moms because it feels like we’re got blown out cities. And when I talk to the moms in my PTA, you know, what we needed was pretty basic, you know, we needed paid leave. The United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer paid leave. We need affordable childcare. Most Americans pay more for their childcare than their mortgage. You know, we need schools to open up safely. You know, we needed women who had lost their jobs in the pandemic. If you think about so many women, so many women of color — they were working in retail, education, health care, jobs that were automated, you know, because of the pandemic. And there is no national re-training program to help them get back to work. Even though almost half of families, the sole breadwinner are women. So, when, you know, they lose their jobs, the entire family, you know, falls into poverty. And, you know, finally, we needed to get compensated for our unpaid labor. You know, part of the problem, Hari, is that two-thirds of the caretaking work, the domestic work is done by women. So, before you even start your job, you’ve done two and a half jobs. And so, we’re constantly negotiating, doing all of this unpaid labor with doing all the paid labor that we do, and it’s untenable. And it’s not like that in other countries.

SREENIVASAN: What was that moment where you kind of had your reckoning? Because you talk about the fact that, look, you are one of the lucky ones who had support, who has a husband who was trying to help, who had childcare, when did it become too much?

SAUJANI: You know, I found myself in the pandemic, I just had my second child, Psy (ph). I was — you know, had a kindergartner at home. I was running the largest women and girl’s organization in the world. And so, here I am trying to save my nonprofit, take care of my newborn, you know, homeschool my six-year-old, and we’re in the middle of the pandemic when all I want to do is keep my family alive. And so, I looked at my leadership team, which was mostly female, you know, of working parents, you know, with little kids, and there was just no support. And I think, so, for so many of us we were just trying to hang on. And I think this feeling — I think for the school closures, Hari, the way they made that decision. You know, America has time and use surveys. And so, we kind of knew in March, April and May who was doing the homeschooling, who was balancing their full-time jobs with full-time caretaking. We knew it was women. And so, when we knew to close the schools and to do it in a way that, again, as a kindergartner, I couldn’t just be like, hey, Sean, log yourself onto Zoom while I take this call. Like I had to be there and do it with him. And so, we knew that women going to have do that, and we still did it without even a thought to the ramifications on their life. And now, women are in crisis. Two years later, Hari, you know, 51 percent of mothers say their anxious and depressed. You know, the CDC released a report saying the two subgroups that are suffering for the most anxiety and depression are young people and moms. Moms don’t break, but we are broken now because of the past two years have broken us. You know, we, once again, have an opportunity in Washington right now to get childcare as part of the package. You know, 66 percent of Americans say, like, it matters to them — you know, in swing states, it matters to them whether the congressional official is going to be supporting childcare. So, you know, we have got to keep fighting in this moment and pushing our elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, to do the right thing, because moms are watching. And I promise you, you will pay the price in the ballot box if you do not pass childcare.

SREENIVASAN: Employers, some of them, are going to come back and say, look, we’ve increased our working from home flexibility, but you’re saying that’s not all the flexibility that you’re asking for, it’s a different type of empowerment?

SAUJANI: Yes. I mean, I think it’s a wholesale rebuilding of the workforce. You know, we’ve built workforces for, you know, a man who had a stay-at-home partner. We didn’t build workplaces for a single mom, a woman of color. And you always should build for the most vulnerable. I certainly did that for Girls Who Code. And I think the opportunity here is, you know, yesterday, we released a report, you know, with McKenzie, you know, making the case that childcare is a business issue. And we released a national business childcare coalition of companies who get it because we are still in the throes of the great resignation. 4 million are quitting every month. And we surveyed 1,000 parents, and half of the women who left the workforce during the pandemic left because of childcare. So, if you want to get them back and you want to get women back in a way that may just not — do they just, you know, survived but they thrive, you got to support them with childcare. We have to pay for childcare. Subsidize it, offer childcare benefits. You know, we offer museum memberships and we pay for people’s IVF, but we got to pay for their childcare.

SREENIVASAN: Along with paying for childcare, what does that reimagined workplace look like when it’s not designed around a man?

SAUJANI: Right. You know, like I said, it includes childcare, it includes flexibility and remote working. You know, Hari, workdays are 9:00 to 5:00, but school days are 8:00 to 3:00, that doesn’t make sense. You know, in this day and age, again, where you need two people, you know, when you have a two-person family, is to basically be participating in the workforce. So, we got to rethink that. We have to think about the execution of paid leave. It’s not enough for companies just to tout with that they offer paid leave. But the question that they have to ask themselves are, are they encouraging or even incentivizing men to take it too? You know, I know so many dads — and here’s the thing, people always to me, Reshma, how do men feel about “Pay Up”? What’s your response from them? And I always say, they’re with me too. They want the exact same things. So many dads over the past two years, you know, they didn’t have to commute two hours, you know, a day to work. So, they got to take their son to school. They got to play soccer with them. They got to take care of them and it felt good. And we know that when men engage in caretaking work, you know, it lowers the rate of diabetes, of heart attacks, right? It’s good for them. And so — but so many dads I talk to, their gaslit at work when they take paid leave or they — when they too want to, you know, fight for flexibility and remote work. And so, we have to stop that. We need corporate policies that actually encourage and incentivize men to be part of the, you know, caretaking structure. You know, our goal for every company should say, how do I get my employees to get to 50/50 percent of domestic work at home? How do I create corporate policies that are going to incentivize that caretaking work rather that penalize it? Because right now, many companies actually penalize man when they participate in caretaking work?

SREENIVASAN: You also take, you know, pains to say, hey, listen, we have law in the books so that there is not discrimination against women or against moms or pregnancies, but there is still antibias that happens, anti-mom bias that happens in the workplace?

SAUJANI: Absolutely. I mean, think about the pay gap. You know, we love to think about the pay gap as a gender gap, but it’s not, it’s a motherhood penalty. You know, the pay gap is between mothers and fathers in the workforce. In fact, the largest pay gap is between childless women and moms. You know, right now, in 22 states, women, childless women are making more than men. That is amazing, but that is not what the pay gap — with the gender pay gap is about. Every company should literally go in and, you know, audit their payroll to see where they are punishing mothers for being mothers and root it out. You know, when you are a mom and you take one year off, you know, you lose 40 percent of your income. And this is — I mean, so many moms who had two downshift their careers or take a break, again, this — the two past few years because they had supplement, you know, their paid leave or for unpaid labor are going to pay a price when they re-enter the workforce. And so, this is a fixable. You know, this is solvable. But, yes, you know, while we do have some legal protections, we still do not have protections against mothers who are doing caretaking. They can still get fired for that.

SREENIVASAN: One of the ideas that you put forward both in your memo awhile back and in the book is trying to value $1 figure value the work that is happening at home.

SAUJANI: And that’s worth, you know, $800 billion. I’ve spent (ph), you know, a survey that basically indicates that. Melinda Gates has talked about this, that women do two and a half jobs of unpaid labor. So, you know, that is work. You know, when you are cooking and cleaning and figuring out whether the diaper bag is packed and making sure your view doctor’s appointments, all of that is cognitive labor, a mental load that so many of us carry on top of doing the full-time job that we are doing. You know, right now, Hari, we have the lowest birth rate in 50 years. So, many young women look at me and they say, no thank you. And they don’t want to have kids because it is not affordable. It is not respected. And so, other nations have something called the parental income. The U.K. has it. Canada has it. Of course, the Swedes have it. And so, when you have a child, you get a check from the government because that is acknowledging that that work is work. You know, we have this in a form of the child tax credit until we let it expire but over 40 billion kids in poverty. You know, in this country, we do not value — we like to say we are country of family values. No, we are not. We don’t value parenting. We don’t value caretaking. We think it is a personal problem that you have to solve. That is why there is so much resistance from my policy sector, you know, against, again, having affordable childcare, passing paid leave, you know, making sure that we have a child tax credit. There is so much resistance to that. You know, Joe Manchin says this is not work. You should only get a child tax credit if you are working in the workplace, as if the work that I do alone is not work. And that is the shift that we have to make.

SREENIVASAN: What do you think the prospect is, even in the Biden administration, for getting some of the things that you are asking for done?

SAUJANI: Look, I’m going to keep fighting to the, you know, very last second. And we have the opportunity, you know, right now to get childcare, you know, in a reconciliation bill. And I know there are two senators that are really fighting hard for that. But the reality is, is that I think that elected officials have made it clear that moms, women, are not a priority, you know, are not something that they put front and center, our labor, you know, our mental health does not have value for them. And it is an indication for me as an activist, you know, as a mother, that we have to fight, that we have to turn our rage into power. You know, we see this with what’s happened, you know, with abortion. Six out of 10 women who get an abortion are mothers. Half of them are mothers who already have two children. The reason why we need control over our reproductive rights is because we live in a country, you know, that ould rather force birth than offer paid leave, affordable childcare, you know. And so, this is all interconnected and we have to see it as interconnected and we have to keep fighting and pushing. And, you know, we — in 2022, we have not made the progress that I would have hoped that we would have made. You know, for a long time, I was shocked. I thought that the first bill that they would pass is paid leave. The first bill they would have passed is childcare. But it is not a priority. But, you know, again, until it is over, over, we have to keep fighting for it. But I am turning to the private sector and asking them to step up, you know, while we wait and fight for our government to do the right thing.

SREENIVASAN: Are you optimistic?

SAUJANI: Am I optimistic? No, I am heartbroken.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that the private sector will step up and fill this gap or will we have another sort of patchwork where companies that have the means will try to do better and most companies that don’t won’t because there is no regulatory framework that incentivizes or penalizes them?

SAUJANI: Look, I think the opportunity is that we are in a talent war. And companies are desperate to fill those jobs. And again, people keep leaving, and they are not leaving because they don’t want to work. They are leaving because they do not want to work for you. And they are shopping. You know, that is what we found in our survey with McKenzie is that they are looking — they’re literally shopping. 70 percent of women that have children under the age of five said that whether the company offers childcare is a huge factor for them. And they would go work for a company that did over one that didn’t. So, I think companies are recognizing this. And this is why, you know, as we’ve launched our national business child care coalition, you know, we’ve gotten so many companies to stand up, you know, who are doing incredible things. And so, again, when we announced this yesterday in “The New York Times,” like we were like overwhelmed with the response of companies being, like, me too, sign me up. I am doing this. I’m thinking about doing this. How do I figure this out? Because there is an alignment. You know, there’s alignment in terms of what companies need to do for business reasons and what parents actually need. So, I have a lot of faith. And, listen, I know you know me, like, I am on a mission to make sure that every single company in the next three to five years is offering some sort of childcare benefits, because that is the only way that we get to equality. Childcare is at the center of it. And, you know, far too often, you know, we have women just make unconscionable choices that is not right. You know, I think about my mother. You know, I was a daughter of refugees. And my mom could not afford the $50 a week for childcare. So, I was a latchkey kid from the time I was 10 years old. And my sister would pick me up in my middle school and we would literally just run home. Go in the house, lock the door. And I think about how my mother felt every day. At 3:45. Thinking about the fact that her babies had to go home and take care of themselves, the fear that she had. So many parents are making unconscionable choices because they have to work, because they want to work, because they need to work. So, why are we making it so hard for them? It does not make sense.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work and Why It’s Different Than You Think.” Author Reshma Saujani, thanks so much.

SAUJANI: Thank you for having me.