Interview
How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani
- The Girls Who Code movement aims to expand exponentially in India and the UK while scaling to reach every girl in America and globally, with a goal to grow from 10,000 current clubs to a movement where one leader inspires a hundred.
- Plans include embedding coding education within tech companies like Facebook and Spotify, creating a "sisterhood" model, and shifting the cultural narrative to make coding "cool" through media representations such as teen dramas and celebrity collaborations.
- A National Business Coalition is proposed to compel companies to subsidize childcare and egg freezing, challenging the view that these are personal problems and framing them instead as economic issues where less than 10% of US companies currently provide support.
- The speaker intends to establish a "Marshall Plan for Moms" to address the lack of structural support during crises, advocating for government-mandated paid leave and affordable childcare to prevent millions of women from being forced out of the workforce.
- Risks identified include the potential loss of millions of women from the labor force if policies remain unchanged, a mental health crisis characterized by high anxiety and depression rates among mothers, and the exhaustion caused by "hustle culture" and intensive parenting expectations.
- Cultural shifts are predicted to move away from "girl boss" and "lean in" narratives that blame women for system failures, toward a state where motherhood is normalized in the workplace and women can choose any path from president to stay-at-home mom without regret.
- Strategic organizational changes involve stepping down as CEO to allow new leadership, building a board of family and friends, and filtering all career opportunities through a "prism" of impact to avoid unpaid labor and distraction from the speaker's "Dharma."
- The speaker plans to challenge the "old normal" of rigid schedules and long commutes, advocate for men to take mandated paid leave to correct childbearing ratios, and resist the expectation that women must fix themselves to fit existing structures.
- Material data points include the expectation that 11 million women left the workplace during the pandemic, the initial statistic that only 0.4% of girls were interested in coding, and the projection that the movement will continue to explode internationally.
- Personal objectives focus on setting boundaries to prevent burnout, prioritizing eight hours of sleep, and ensuring women do not live lives of regret, while rewriting past political failures as empowering lessons for future advocacy.