How Reshma Saujani Is Changing the Narrative on the Motherhood Penalty

One of the greatest privileges of building For Her, By Us has been sitting down with single mothers and the organizations supporting them. Every woman has a different story - widowhood, divorce, choice, circumstances never chosen.

But through all my interviews, I keep hearing the same answer to one question: "Where do you wish you had more support?" Almost always, it comes back to affordable childcare and workplaces that accommodate family life.

That answer stayed with me, because it's my story too. When my father died, my mother suddenly had to raise my older brother and me alone. He was eight, and I was four. In the midst of grief, she went back to work, adjusted to one income, and struggled to find affordable childcare. But she had no time to pause - she had bills to pay, kids to raise, and a family to support.

While researching childcare affordability, I came across the documentary No Country for Mothers. What pulled me in wasn't just the film - it was the woman behind it.

I'd long admired Reshma Saujani for founding Girls Who Code. But what struck me was how the pandemic reshaped her thinking on motherhood and pushed her to ask: what happens to the mothers raising these girls, when no one's supporting them?

That question became Moms First — a movement to open the window on affordable childcare, paid leave, and a culture that values caregiving instead of leaving families to figure it out alone.

In our conversation, Reshma talked about the moment that changed everything for her, why she thinks America needs to fundamentally rethink how it supports families, and why a country that values mothers and the sacrifices they make is a better place for all.

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In January 2020, everything was going right for Reshma Saujani. Girls Who Code had just aired a Super Bowl commercial. Professionally, she was at a career high - the organization she'd built had gone global, inspiring hundreds of thousands of girls to consider careers in tech. Personally, she also just had her second child.

Then it all fell apart. The pandemic hit, and like millions of parents, Saujani found herself juggling everything. "I found myself having to go back to work, take care of a newborn, homeschool a kindergartener, and literally save my nonprofit from being shut down," she said.

She wasn't the only one. Nearly everyone on her leadership team was raising young kids too, and they were all just trying to get through the day. As schools shut down and childcare vanished, mothers across the country faced impossible choices. Many left the workforce entirely - those who stayed carried a weight nobody could see.

But it wasn't just her own team that changed how she thought about this. Some of the girls that Girls Who Code had spent years supporting - kids headed toward schools like MIT - started dropping out of the pipeline. Their mothers were essential workers, and they needed their girls to help watch their younger siblings and even take jobs to help cover rent. Overnight, they went from dreaming big to just trying to make ends meet.

That's when it clicked for Reshma. "I realized that I could teach millions of girls to code," Saujani said, "but if I didn't help their mothers, I hadn't done anything."

That realization pushed her beyond tech advocacy into the world of caregiving, economic security, and policy reform. Today, as founder and CEO of Moms First and author of No Country for Mothers, she's become one of the loudest and boldest voices to support families and mothers.

Saujani doesn't think mothers can grit their way through this. Affordable childcare and paid leave aren't just nice-to-haves for parents. In her view, they're investments in the workforce itself. "Policy alone won't fix this," she says, "Culture matters too."

For decades, mothers have been pushed to judge each other instead of understanding a fundamental question: why is caregiving so hard and unaffordable in the first place? Working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, married mothers, single mothers are all pitted against each other, even though they're dealing with the same struggles.

"We need to reject the idea that there is one 'right' way to be a mother," she said. "Every mom deserves support, flexibility, and dignity." 

That's the thinking behind Moms First. "We have a saying at Moms First," she told me. "Culture eats policy for breakfast."

Instead of putting all their weight behind legislation, they lean hard into truth telling - documentaries, social media, TV, public campaigns - meeting people where they already are. The goal is to stop treating caregiving as a private family problem and start treating it as what it actually is: an economic issue worth public investment.

One part of Saujani's vision hits close to home for the readers of my platform. 

Nearly one in five mothers in America are raising kids alone. "I actually always say we need to build for them first," she said. "If we build a system that works for single moms, we'll have a system that works for all of us."

While filming No Country for Mothers and traveling the country, she noticed something - mothers from completely different backgrounds kept describing the same experience. Married or single, working outside the home or caring for kids full-time, the same themes came up. Childcare they couldn't afford. Exhausted, emotionally and physically. Constantly feeling judged. Rather than dwelling on what separates mothers, she thinks advocacy should start from what they share.

Saujani says making the film didn't give her closure; instead, it showed her this work was far from over. "So much of the shame I carried as a mom was never mine to begin with," she said. "It was handed to me by a system that makes moms feel like they're failing."

After screenings of the movie, women kept telling her the same thing, almost word for word: "I thought it was just me."

That's the whole point of her work. Mothers aren't looking for perfection – they are looking to be seen and heard. Watching thousands of women organize their own community screenings has convinced her that the tides are changing. Isolation is slowly turning into solidarity, and shame is giving way to purpose.

If there's one thing she wants every overwhelmed mother to hear, it's simple. "You're not failing," she said. "Motherhood in America is impossible by design."

We're part of a system that runs on what Saujani calls the “motherhood penalty”. The moment a woman has a child, her career trajectory and paycheck take a hit, not because her ability changed, but because the system was never built to support caregiving. Mothers are expected to carry impossible loads and expect almost nothing back in return. She hopes that by portraying those failures and getting mothers to stand together, our country can start building policies that actually work.

As Saujani alluded, when mothers stop thinking they're the problem, they become powerful to change the system that failed them.