Joe Fuller: Despite greater awareness of the gender gap in the technology sector, it’s been hard to make a lasting dent. Between 1984 and 2020, the share of women in the tech workforce actually dropped, from just over 35 percent to 32 percent. That’s according to a study by Accenture and the nonprofit Girls Who Code. Since its founding in 2012, Girls Who Code has scaled up dramatically—from a summer coding boot camp for 20 participants in New York City, the organization has grown to reach almost half a million participants worldwide. The group’s aim is to drive parity in tech by balancing the talent pipeline, from elementary school through college and beyond. The group has attracted backing from a Who’s Who of corporate and philanthropic donors. Nonetheless, the challenge is arguably greater now, as women have been disproportionately burdened by the pandemic. As the numbers—and the experience of many women in technology—suggest, there’s a long way to go.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Today I’m joined by Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and the nonprofit Marshall Plan for Moms. The latter advocates for paid family leave, affordable childcare, and a level playing field for mothers in the workplace. A former corporate attorney, Reshma is the first Indian American woman to run for a seat in the U.S. Congress. Her most recent book is titled Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). We’ll talk about the impact of Girls Who Code. And we’ll discuss how to address the challenges facing working mothers post-Covid. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Reshma.

Reshma Saujani: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Fuller: Reshma, you’ve had a rather varied career. Tell us a little bit about that journey and how you find yourself where you are today.

Saujani: I always say I’m first and foremost a daughter of refugees. My parents came here from Uganda in 1973. Both of them were trained engineers, but my father worked as a machinist in a plant; my mother sold cosmetics. I knew from the time I was a little girl that I wanted to make a difference in the world, that I wanted to give back to this country that saved my parents’ lives. I thought that the way that I would do that was by becoming a lawyer. So I graduated with $300,000 in student loan debt. I kind of found myself 10 years later in a life I didn’t want, in a job I hated, i.e., the corporate lawyer. I found the courage to finally quit one day, because I realized I was 33 years old, I wasn’t getting any younger. And I decided I was going to run for Congress. I lost spectacularly. But losing something that you have kind of been working your whole life to do and realizing that that loss doesn’t break you is probably the most freeing thing that you can do. It freed me up, and it freed me up to start an organization to teach kids to code when I didn’t code.

Fuller: Well, let’s talk about that “thing” called “Girls Who Code,” which is a not-for-profit that you founded and have enjoyed outsized success, rapid scaling—also in many ways, I think, is iconic in the entire discussion about gender diversity in tech talent and became a focal point for a lot of discussions. So tell us about your inspiration for doing that and how you scaled it so quickly, because it was really quite remarkable how big it became.

Saujani: Well, it’s 2010. I am running for office here in New York City. I’d go into schools, and I’d go into their robotics classes and their computer science classes. I would just see lines and lines and lines of boys. I remember thinking, “Where are the girls?” I knew that Silicon Valley was a boys’ club, but I didn’t know that club started in high school, and it made me a little mad. So when I lost that congressional race, I decided I’m not going back to the private sector, but I decided also, “Wow, I saw a lot of complex problems on the campaign trail. What’s one of them that maybe I want to fix?” I kept thinking about those coding classrooms without girls. I think the topic of girls in tech was interesting to me as the daughter of refugees, because I was blown away when I heard that you made $120,000 as a software programmer and that, in many ways, those jobs can be gateways into the middle class. So for me, I was interested in poverty alleviation. I was interested in this idea that there’s this whole new industry that is growing, that everybody is desperately seeking employees, and maybe this is a place where we can all start from the same starting line and have the shot of getting girls—and girls of color—in those positions. I spent two years working on this idea. I was the Deputy Public Advocate of New York, but at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I would meet with somebody. I’d meet with a teacher. I’d meet with a PhD student.

Fuller: Who did you decide to talk to? Who did you think would know enough to help you shape this solution to this rather ill-defined and not very widely understood problem?

Saujani: Now, I’d gotten my master’s at the Kennedy School, so I had known how to develop basically almost like a policy plan on solving a societal issue. So I quickly was, like, “We’ve got to build a pipeline. We have to teach girls to code.” How do we teach them? Do we teach them in school? Do we teach them outside of school? What’s the number that you teach? Where do we teach them? So it became clear that to introduce computer science as a topic that every girl should learn in a middle school or a high school was going to be hard. But what seemed like an interesting place to intervene was the summer, because parents were desperately looking for summer programs and something to “do with their kids.” I was, like, “Wow, what if you built a summer program inside of a tech company?” What could that look like? How do you design something like that? I had met somebody, I think, that was running a White House fellowship. They said, ”Well, anytime you want to teach a new skill, the number 20 is a good number for building a cohort.” So I was, like, “Great, I’m going to get 20 girls in high school, put them inside of a technology company, and teach them how to code.” The other interesting thing was, I met this woman, Leigh Ann Sudol, who had gotten her PhD in teaching computer science to girls. She had told me this interesting fact—that basically 74 percent of girls are thinking about picking a career that’s about changing the world. Part of the problem with computer science is that we weren’t really meeting girls where they were at—that the image of a computer programmer was a guy sitting in a basement somewhere drinking a Red Bull. He wasn’t solving cancer or Covid or climate or building an app to fight bullying, but that’s what girls were interested in. So if you designed a curriculum that taught them how to build something that they cared about, that could basically lock them in. That was the model.

Fuller: So tell us about the early cohorts, missteps, things you learned along the way. How did you get girls who had that image of—the not-very-appealing image, I must admit—of the guy slamming away on his keyboard drinking Red Bull in his basement. How did you start changing that image?

Saujani: So the model was 20 girls inside a classroom for seven weeks. Every day, they learn how to code, and it’s free. Half the girls we reach will be from underserved backgrounds, under the poverty line, or Black and Latina. We will build it inside a tech company, and the tech company will actually provide volunteers or their employees, so they feel connected. The goal was essentially, this would be the pipeline that said tech company would then hire from, and it worked. We did the first program, and it was a huge success, meaning the girls loved it. It was transformative. They actually learned how to code. I came up with this number—300 percent. I was going to grow by 300 percent every year, because my goal was to teach 1,000,000 girls to code, and I was going to keep growing and keep growing. Now, I realized at some point that, now, running the largest summer camp in the country or the world is really hard in terms of, from a staffing perspective, from all of the safety measures, the food, the recruiting of the teachers. So if I was going to scale, I needed to get into schools. What I found very early on, too, is that the girls were so grateful that they had this powerful life-changing experience that they would say to me, “Reshma, what can I do?” I remember I started saying to them, pretty much the second summer that we had Girls Who Code, was, “I have one favor to ask you. I want you to identify one girl that you’re going to recruit to come back to the program and to come back to the summer camp.” And it worked. In fact, we were turning girls away pretty much the second summer that we put this on. So the recruitment issue was never really that challenging. But what was challenging was, again, continuing to scale this model. What I started thinking about was, “What if we started having Girls Who Code clubs? What if I asked my students to go back to their school and to launch an after-school club?” And I started making that ask, and we launched our first 100 clubs and then our first 1,000 clubs. Then, before the pandemic, we had almost 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs across the country. That is really how we reached the numbers that we’re talking about.

Fuller: So when you made that pivot to a club model, you’re moving out of the tech company’s direct purview. How did you make the economic model?

Saujani: We’re still there.

Fuller: You’re doing tech companies still providing the guidance and the material and still viewing this as hiring pipelines?

Saujani: No, we’re still in the tech companies, but we’re also in clubs. We’re also in after-school programs. Then we’re in colleges, because basically we’re building the pipeline of talent for companies. But then we also realized, wow, okay, now we have 80,000 girls that are majoring in computer science in college, but some of them are dropping out, because the other place where the pipeline is leaky is in college. So we start launching another vertical, which was college loops, to essentially make sure that girls were connected to one another to prevent them from actually dropping out once they declare computer science as a major.

Fuller: Do you have any sense of how many of those 80,000 are Girls Who Code alumnae? And what’s the difference—you said earlier, a quite fascinating comment, that the kind of the boys’ club starts in high school. When it gets to college, other than the fact that you probably get away with drinking beer, what’s different about the club in college that causes the attrition rate you’re describing?

Saujani: That’s a great question. Look, I’m on a board of a university. I’m actually on the Board of Overseers at Harvard. So what’s interesting is that there isn’t a drop-off when a young woman declares social science as a major. But if you declare computer science as a major, the drop off is almost like 15 to 20 percent, and it’s virtually zero for a young man. I think that a lot of that is about what happens in the classroom. It’s hard to be the only one. There are far fewer women than there are men—now, that is changing—but there’s far fewer computer science professors that are female than men. We still have kind of microaggressions made in the classroom, like, “Oh, girls don’t do that.” I think really changing, again, the culture of who we think is a programmer, who isn’t, is critical. The good news is I feel like now 10 years later, we’ve done that. We don’t have Barbie dolls that say, “I hate math; let’s go shopping instead.” When you turn on Netflix, the No. 1 teen drama, the protagonist, is a cool girl coder. I have more parents who come to me, instead of saying, “Tell me how to convince my daughter to go into robotics,” she’s like, “My daughter’s the captain of the robotics team. Can you take a selfie with me?” So the culture has dramatically shifted. So I feel very good about the pipeline that is going into tech companies that tech companies can then now hire from.

Fuller: So give us the basic demographics of Girls Who Code today in terms of absolute size of a cohort per year, geographic spread. Are you getting beyond classic coding and computer language to other types of technology, interests like robotics, that you just mentioned?

Saujani: Yeah. Our model is essentially, we’re teaching computer science, which is basically problem solving. We teach a variety of different languages. We are talking about crypto, we’re talking about cybersecurity. We’re moving into, again, how the industry is really evolving. But the way that we’ve always set up programs for the past nine years is that girls basically build something to solve a problem that they care about. Now that might be they’re building an algorithm. That might be they’re building a robot. They may be building an app. It’s all about the problem-solving piece rather than the regurgitation of languages. We are across the world. We’ve launched programs in the U.K., India, and Canada. We’ve had to move our summer programs virtual. So now we’re able to actually reach more kids, more kids across the world, which I think has been profound. I think the next point and the next part of what we need to work on is workforce. We need to make sure that we’re actually closing the gender gap in the technology workforce, which was our original goal.

Fuller: Well, it seems that in your career, you’re now actually following the girls you were helping to code later into their lives with your most recent endeavor, Marshall Plan for Moms. Talk a little bit about that and how one takes that effort to diversify the pipeline of talent and turn it into a meaningful change in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion inside these big companies. Some of our research indicates it’s a pretty uneven performance so far.

Saujani: I think the pandemic has given us an opportunity to see it in a different light. So for a long time now, 72 percent of valedictorians are female; 57 percent of college graduates are female; the majority of PhDs and those who get their master’s degrees are women. So when you kind of look at any organization as if it’s a triangle, the bottom of the triangle, there’s equality there. But then we start losing and losing and losing women as we move to the top. We did a study with Accenture that showed that 50 percent of women will leave the tech workforce by the time they’re 35. Well, what’s happening in your mid-30s? You’re becoming a mom. I think the conventional wisdom that we would say, well, people have kids and they want to leave. It’s not true. We get pushed out, because we’ve really never designed workforces to work for working moms. So that is what I think that the opportunity is for many of these companies, because, again, if you look at the numbers—in terms of the leadership numbers, the management numbers—not much has changed. We can’t attribute this to performance. We can’t attribute this because women don’t have mentors or sponsors, or they’re not color coding their calendar, or they need to learn another skill set or raise their hand more. It’s not about the woman. The structure is broken. And we have to stop trying to fix the woman and fix the structure.

Fuller: You have a new book out called Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work [(and Why It's Different Than You Think)]. What do you mean by paying up? How does that fit with this picture you’ve just painted for us?

Saujani: Yeah, I think “paying up” in concrete terms means, for many women who work in hourly jobs, predictable flexibility. Walmart built an app that allows people to change their shifts with one another. You have to remember that, if you are a woman working in retail, and you have a child, and your shift starts at 7:00, you’ve paid for a babysitter and you can show up to your 7:00 PM shift and it’s canceled? Now you’re out money. We also have to not just reward output, but we have to take care of people’s mental health. Working moms are in a mental health crisis right now. Instead of just doing performance reviews, we should be doing wellness reviews. We’re at a moment where I quite frankly think it’s time to start talking about how childcare is an economic issue. The No. 1 reason why women are either downshifting their careers or not returning to the workforce is because childcare is either too expensive or unavailable. The reality is that your attrition rate is probably more expensive than paying for somebody’s childcare. When you pay for their childcare, they are loyal to you. Back in the day, you had people who worked—I think about my two parents—they worked at their companies for 30 years each. Their bosses knew my name. We went to the picnics together. It was about the family. And we’ve lost that. I think the Great Resignation is, “I care about my family, I want to be with my kids, I want to be with my parents. I want to spend time with my family, and I want to work for a company that cares about that.”

Fuller: In your descriptions, you went everywhere from retail associates at Walmart to people in professional settings, white-collar settings, highly compensated settings. What are the common denominators that cut across the circumstances confronting women throughout the spectrum of jobs? And which are more unique to that white-collar tech-enabled job where you started your efforts?

Saujani: Well, I think one is the cost and the availability of childcare. So right now, half of daycare centers are still shut down. I got an email from a midwife, and she said, I live in a state where, if there is one Covid case and a daycare, the entire daycare shuts down. I’ve had five absences at work. My daycare center has now shut down again. My employer has basically said one more absence and you’re fired. So what does she do? For another woman, the same thing might happen. Her school might close, but she’s working remotely at home and on Zoom. Now her kids are interrupting her again, and her employer again is now rolling their eyes, saying, “One more time, and you’re not getting that opportunity. You’re not getting that promotion.” I think what it’s doing is exacerbating the motherhood penalty, which already existed in the workplace in terms of both compensation and promotion.

Fuller: When we think of big corporate headquarters that have onsite childcare facilities—which are always, of course, in my experience fully booked and have a five-year waiting list—but a Bright Horizons center, we have stories about private equity funds that are subsidizing nanny hires or paying for nannies to go on the road with their women partners. Those are very interesting vignettes, but they seem quite unapproachable to most companies. Certainly, when you start looking at small and medium-sized companies that are not living on 35 percent operating margins and 95 percent market shares, like some tech companies do, what you’re saying sounds awfully daunting. Whether it’s paid for by a requirement of the employer or by some change in tax policies, how can a small and medium businesses approach these questions in a way that you think speaks to their economics as well to their good intentions?

Saujani: I was in a panel with a CEO yesterday, and she said something, a former CEO, and she said something fascinating. Their company had an in-house daycare center. She says the other problem is investors. If you’re a public company and your investors come in, and they see the daycare center, they say, close the daycare center down, because if you have enough money to plan a daycare center, clearly that’s taking away from shareholder value. I think the perspective that we have about the responsibility employers have to their employees and their employees’ families’ needs to shift across the board. So we, again, start seeing it’s like healthcare, we would never cut your healthcare plan because now we see healthcare as a necessity for being able to work, because it was the largest cost center for families. Childcare is the same thing. So I do think that now companies are moving in the direction of subsidies for childcare, building daycare centers, backup options, and providing those kinds of benefits that they know ensure loyalty and reduce attrition with their employees. Now, the question is, “I’m a small business owner, and I can’t afford to do that. What can I do?” What I tell small business owners or those who employ hourly workers is really focus on what can you do to give, to allow for, predictability? What workers are looking for is control over their schedules. I think that is something that we can then, either we’re pooling together resources to build a predictability app for retail workers or restaurant workers, but we got to start thinking in this direction.

Fuller: We recently had Micha Kaufman, the founder and CEO of the big contingent work or gig work platform Fiverr on our broadcast. How does the growing availability of, essentially, design your own schedule, accept the number of hours you want, accept only the jobs you want that are offered through gig platforms? At all levels of the job spectrum, you can go to a Toptal to get data scientists, go to a Catalent to get strategy consultants and marketing experts. You can go to broader-based platforms like Fiverr and find anything—everything from drone film footage editors to all of the above. Is that going to change the rules of the game? And does the availability of content work really take some of the pressure off some of these issues in terms of women’s pursuing meaningful careers that can sustain a better lifestyle?

Saujani: It does if that’s what success means, because I think women have been doing that forever. We have been downshifting and moving from being the product manager or the head of engineering to consulting for a long time now. That’s what we’ve been forced to do, because we had to reconcile our motherhood and our job. And employers weren’t allowing women to do that. So again, and we have to be very clear, we do not live in a country where the vast majority of people can not work. Two-income family households are the norm, because, again, whether it’s inflation, the cost of goods, most people have to work. So the gig economy is an opportunity for them to work and have flexibility, because, again, to deal with the high cost of childcare. But that’s not about choice. I think what we want to get to a world is about choice. It means that we just have to accept that the numbers of—if we’re looking at the top 500 companies and the measure of equality in terms of who sits on the board, who runs those companies, who’s in management—those numbers are not going to ever change unless we have structural change.

Fuller: You mentioned earlier how Covid-19 had changed the way people were thinking about work. That’s certainly something that we’ve researched and published about it at Harvard Business School. What are you seeing in your dialogue with companies? Are you seeing a different tone or attitude or openness on these issues as a function of Covid, or is it too soon to tell?

Saujani: No, I think there’s real resistance. I think everyone wants to go back to the way that it was before. Or if they’re not going back to the way that it was before, they’re knee-jerk responding to what they think their employees want without really thinking about design. I think that’s deeply problematic, too. I don’t think that we have sat, taken a step back and said, what did we learn? What was working pre-pandemic? And what did we learn in the pandemic? So, if we are to be honest, workplaces have never worked for working moms. The evidence is in the attrition rate. All that investment that we make to get them in is just lost. And we know why they’re leaving. Workplace has never worked for working moms. They haven’t been working for people of color. The amount of Black and brown people who say, “I face microaggressions in the workplace. Now the fact that I’m not in the workplace, I feel healthier, I’m sleeping better, my mental health is better,” tells you that workplaces were never really working for people of color, nor were they working for non-binary LGBTQ. So we have to really ask ourselves, who are they working for? And what now can we do differently? So this should be a year of experimentation that we should fully embrace. We are not probably going back to a five-day-in-the-office workday. It’s not going to happen. But we also can’t say, “Well, come in when you want,” because what’s going to happen—and you’re already seeing this—all the young men are going to come in, and they’re going to be there with the CEOs. All the moms are going to be at home doing laundry in-between their Zoom calls. And the inequality is going to exacerbate, because we have not really thought carefully about design. How do we make sure that we don’t have a two-tier system—for women and for men? So, again, I would like to see a lot more thoughtfulness. You know, when we talk about the future of work, we talk about the future of work in terms of robots and technology. Really, we should be thinking about the future of work from a human capital perspective. What do humans want the future of work to look like? How do we resolve work with life, genuinely? How do we just accept that people are actually going to be more productive if they’re happier? And if you’re spending two and a half hours to commute to work and you don’t see your kids, you’re not going to be happy.

Fuller: Well, Reshma, we talk a lot about trying to design work and work practices around workers and about building talent pipelines and retaining talent, avoiding gratuitous turnover. You’re talking about it now in terms of much more fundamental redesign of work, as we think about it. If I were a CEO, or I should say if I were still a CEO, sitting here in spring 2022, and I came to you and said, “All right, Reshma, I’m prepared to think about that,” how do I think about design from the level of postulates, as according to Reshma Saujani?

Saujani: The first thing you would say is how do I give people—how do I give women—more control over their schedule? We know that 79 percent of workers want flexibility in how, when, and where they work. We know that the way the old normal was set up, it didn’t work. Why is the workday 9 to 5 and the school day 8 to 3, when 86 percent of women who are participating, essentially, in the workforce are going to be a mother at some point? So really thinking about control, and how do you do it is critical. And little things: Make it equitable, offer it to all employees, prioritize output over face time. Don’t call it “working from home,” which reinforces a stigma that you’re not working. Implement more collaboration hours—let’s say that’s 9 to 1—so people could kind of play around when they need to be available and live and work independently. The second thing I would do from a design perspective is support women and parents with childcare. We are in a childcare crisis, and without affordable, reliable, quality childcare, people can’t work. It’s just that simple. We’re already offering people—we’re freezing their eggs, we’re giving them gym memberships—but when you become a parent, the support ends. So think about what you can do and what makes sense for you, whether that’s a subsidy, whether that’s backup care, whether that’s predictability or flexibility. But there’s a range of options that you could basically offer that kind of meet what you can afford. The last thing I would say is really think thoughtfully about your own role in shaping gender dynamics at home. There’s no better example of this than paid leave. When women take leave and men don’t, it establishes right away that caregiving work and household responsibilities are going to fall primarily on women. So think about what you should be doing. Should you be mandating or incentivizing the men to take paid leave in your office? But companies can do far more in creating equality at home, which will create equality in the workplace.

Fuller: One thing that frequently comes up, Reshma, in conversations about this, at least in the American labor market, is that the solution ultimately is going to be interventions by the federal or state governments that essentially create the equivalent right to childcare as a right to attend a public school and that there were there other things the government should be doing to enable some of the changes and make it more plausible for employers, especially smaller employers, to adhere to the emerging Saujani design principles. Are there countries that you looked at and say they’ve got it closer to right than wrong, or are there elements of what’s going on elsewhere that maybe you’ve been exposed to through your research or through Girls Who Code that you think we can look to and beg, borrow, or steal their best ideas?

Saujani: Yeah, so many industrializations did not have the same exodus of millions of women being pushed out of the labor force that we did. Canada didn’t experience that. The U.K. didn’t experience that. France did not experience that. The Swedes did not experience that. These countries have paid leave. These nations have parental income. In the U.K., once you become a parent, you get a check from the government that is basically valuing all of that unpaid labor that you are going to do to make sure that the economy is strong. Many of these nations are already providing affordable subsidized childcare. Canada’s an example of that. They’ve been experimenting with this in Quebec for a long time. They know that women cannot work unless they have the structural support in the form of paid leave, affordable childcare, and parental income. They’ve been implementing these policies for a long time. They’ve seen the benefits in terms of workplace participation and just healthier, happier, more productive families.

Fuller: Well, Reshma, thank you for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast. We’ve been huge admirers of your efforts and the iconic Girls Who Code. And getting your views on how that’s evolved and the future issues facing women in the workplace has just been enlightening. Thank you for joining us.

Saujani: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.