Trad Wife vs. Girl Boss? Reshma Saujani Says It’s All a Distraction

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Reshma Saujani, thanks so much for joining us.

RESHMA SAUJANI: Thank you for having me.

SREENIVASAN: Reshma Saujani, welcome. You are the CEO of Moms First. And before that Girls Who Code. And now you’ve got this really interesting documentary out called “No Country for Mothers.” And this is a really interesting look at the issues that are facing motherhood today and almost going back in time as well, and showing how these challenges have been around for a while. First, what made you wanna make this film now?

SAUJANI: What made me wanna make this film now is I think on some of the policy issues, were really close Hari. Like I think we’re closer to childcare and paid leave than we’ve ever been, but I think what’s standing in the way of us passing these policies is culture wars. I think every time women make progress, we’re handed a culture war to distract and divide us. And I thought if I can do an investigation into really looking at, like, what is it about American motherhood in particular that’s been designed — literally since the ink dried on the Constitution, you know, to con women into thinking that they have these binary choices. If I could wake, if I could make women see that and not participate in that culture war, I think that that we would get miles closer to winning some of these battles.

SREENIVASAN: We saw so many women drop out of the workforce in the pandemic. It was kind of this moment that the entire world paid attention to, you know, ideas like mental load and who’s taking care of what. What made you kind of come out of that and look at this as not just a pandemic related thing, but really more of a structural issue?

SAUJANI: Yeah. So Hari, you know, I had my second baby during the pandemic, and there’s something about having a child or becoming a mother for a pandemic baby that just…evangelizes you. Because, you know, you realize that we actually, when we have choices, we often default to making the mom be the martyr. You know what I mean? Making her be our default social safety net.

So, you know, Sai was born in March of 2020, the world shut down. Like I had to go back to like rebuilding Girls Who Code from scratch. And you know, when that, when the pandemic started, it was the first time in the history of our country that 51% of the labor force was women. Like we were flying our feminist flags high. But when the pandemic happened, they shut down schools and they had mothers like me log on our six year olds at the same time of having to show up at the office. I mean, show up at our, you know, virtual office on Zoom at the same time. And we just didn’t even think about it. Like we assumed that mothers would actually do it. And you saw, you know, four times as many women leave the workforce as men in COVID, because in America, two thirds of the caregiving work is done by women. We are the caregivers. We are basically balancing two jobs at the same time with no support and no help.

And yet we try to approach fixing equality for American women by, you know, giving them another skillset by telling them to color code their calendar, power pose before they go to a meeting in the morning. We make them feel like that they’re the problem and not the structure. And I realized that, Oh my God, we’ve been getting conned. Like we’ve been getting conned since the ink dried on the Constitution. This has never been about our own inadequacies. It’s always been about their inability and the lack of will to solve the structural biases like paid leave and childcare that put us in this position in the first place. And I wanted to go solve that problem. And that’s why I started Moms First.

SREENIVASAN: This tension about motherhood and womanhood and femininity and who contributes and what’s valuable in a family or in the economy you point out in this film is that different versions of this tension have been kind of structurally architected and campaigned for decades.

SAUJANI: That’s right. I mean, Phyllis Schlafly was the OG trad wife.

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SAUJANI: And so the dynamic that I think, or that binary that has always existed since I think women started working in America — which is from the beginning of time — is trad wife, girl boss. I would argue though it’s, you know, same con, new costume, right? She comes in like different forms, day at home mom, working mom, girl boss, trad wife. And you know, what that does is it basically divides and distracts us. It makes women think that they only have two options when the vast majority of women want something in the middle, right? Which is a little bit of both. And, you know, as I traveled the country, I didn’t meet a mom that wanted to, you know, hustle so hard that she never saw her kids or spend her time, you know, milking a cow.

These are just, they’re, they’re made up culture wars. Like most, the vast majority of American women, 99% of them can’t afford to be a girl boss or a trad wife. And so what happens is we get so distracted, you know, in defending our choices that we don’t realize that we’re being tricked. We actually don’t realize that there’s more to us that unites us and divides us. And that was my purpose of this, of “No Country for Mothers.” I wanted people to walk away from this film and be like, oh my God. Like those women at the Turning Point Conference, I may not agree with like 90% of that, but 10% we agree. We agree on childcare, we agree that American motherhood’s broken, we agree that we need more support. And if we can walk, if we can come together on those lines, like these issues aren’t partisan.

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SAUJANI: And there’s, you know, everyone is benefiting, right, from our division, right? It’s like, for example, politicians are benefiting from us being divided, right? From us being in these two different camps. Influencers or authors who are trying to sell a book, are making money, are getting famous off of having us rage bait online. Tech companies are making ad revenue and money off of our own division. And so these are strategies by other people to get wealthier or more powerful or more famous and the people that lose are moms.

SREENIVASAN: You know at one point in the film, we hear the statistic that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation without guaranteed paid leave. That 40% of parents have gone into debt because of childcare costs, and that women still do most of the unpaid labor at home. I mean, those stats, even each on their own would be pretty huge. But all of them are happening simultaneously in a place where we think that, well, you should be able to do both.

SAUJANI: That’s right. I mean, you know, people are drowning because of childcare costs. Like they’re one bad day away from financial ruin, right? A car breaking down, a health event, because all of their savings goes into childcare. And so when you’ve seen states think when they have a surplus or they have an opportunity to make an investment, and they look at, well, what are all the things that I can do for a family? Where are all the, like, ways I can give them more resources? Oftentimes policy makers come to the decision that if I can lower childcare costs, you know what I mean, if I can make it affordable and available, I actually can take families out of a precarious financial situation and put them on the path to the American dream. And so childcare is the linchpin of affordability.

And that’s something that Moms First is you, you know, you know, we’ve been driving towards the past four years of taking it out of something that has always been seen as a personal problem. This is your problem as a family that you have to fix, to it being an economic issue. Workers can’t work without childcare, you know? And businesses don’t work without workers. And so if you care about the American economy, if you actually care about stabilizing American families, the option that you choose is lowering childcare costs. Period.

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During the 2024 campaign, I remember in my media feed seeing a clip of you asking President Trump a question And it was literally about this, right? And what did you make of his response then, and what do you make of his most recent responses when this topic has come back up?

SAUJANI: Well, I think I said in the film, I was shocked they weren’t prepared. Like they didn’t even think about it. And that in of itself was like insulting. But what I will give them is, he said in his response, when I asked him what he would do to fix childcare, he said, childcare is childcare. Americans gotta have it.

And then, you know, most recently during Easter, you know, the question is raised again, and he kind of says, The federal government can’t afford to pay for childcare. I gotta focus on protecting the country — i.e. I have to focus on investing and putting money and resources into foreign wars. And so, like, my, my my reaction to that was like, Wow, like you got billions for bombs, but pennies for moms and kids. And it was, it was something that I thought was pretty remarkable in his, in admitting that he is pretty much saying to American families, Sorry, not sorry. Like, I know the math ain’t math thing, but like, it’s not my problem.

And I think that, you know, the administration is gonna pay a big price for that in the ballot box because, you know, they’re saying that at the same time you see key people in his administration complaining about the declining birth rate and making it seem like that’s our problem. Or that if I give, you know, medals to mothers or build fertility highways, right? Or if I just take away DE and I or, you know, have few women become engineers, if I actually have less educated women and give those opportunities to men, that those women will go have babies. And he’s so wrong — they’re so wrong about that.

SREENIVASAN: Where should the solution come from? Should it be a federal policy or as the administration says this is a state by state issue?

SAUJANI: I think it’s gotta be both. You know, you are seeing, I think states like New Mexico, Vermont, here in New York, you know, I was very involved with Governor Hochul, you, I mean, in getting us closer towards universal childcare. So I had a very intimate look on, like, how this happens. I think states are having to do it because the federal government has refused to fix it, right? Childcare is broken because it’s a market failure. Parents can’t pay more and childcare workers can’t pay less, right? And so you need to have either a government or a private sector option. We know with healthcare that it’s not a — private sector solving this is not good for anybody. And so I think states have had to use their surpluses because of the lack of investment from federal, from the federal government. And so I think if it continues this way, you know, I mean, if the federal government continues to say, Not our problem, I think it’s gonna force states to do it.

But unfortunately, similar to abortion, I feel like — again, an issue that is not partisan, this is, you know, 77% of Americans, regardless of who they voted for, feel like we need to do something about childcare. Period.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the moms had an interesting anecdote about, you know, what the costs are if your child is accused of acting up in school.

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SAUJANI: A reason why, you know, last year with the jobs number, 500,000 women left the workforce, and they were mostly women who had children under the age of five, because that’s a time where your kids need a — as you know, your kids need a lot of attention. They get the flu, you can’t plan it. Like there’s so many unplanned emergencies, events, things that happen. And it’s always on moms to be the ones to go do it. And you then have a lot of employers who already are assuming that we’re less engaged the minute that we have a child in our jobs. And so we are disposable. And it’s why you have the motherhood penalty and you have women making, you know, 6% less in income the minute that they become a mom.

We don’t live in a country or in a society or in workplaces that have a lot of grace for mothers, period. And so it has disastrous economic costs. And the problem is, is many policy makers think we’re living in the 1950s where someone even has the ability to live at home — I mean, stay at home and not work. It’s just not possible. You know what I mean? Like, people are drowning. You need to have two incomes. And which I always say like, we should be building and solving these problems from the perspective of single moms, right? If I can create a society that works for her, it will work for everybody. But we don’t think that way about this.

SREENIVASAN: The credits to this film include 2,500 producers.

SAUJANI: Yep.

SREENIVASAN: I mean, you have a very different strategy in this era.

SAUJANI: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: You’re not, you’re not trying to get an Oscar and have, you know, MGM Fox or whoever put this on Megaplex screens. What, tell me a little bit about that.

SAUJANI: No, we’re not. I mean, listen, Hari, I learned in doing this work that, you know, we’re at a moment where a lot of women’s content, or a lot of content about women’s issues, quite about poor people, about Black and Brown people, but it is getting suppressed. And so even if I had a streamer buy it, it would probably get buried. And I didn’t want that this movie is made for a specific audience, moms, to make them see, be seen, and to make them make change.

And so the way that we created it, one was by like, again, like we blew the world record for the most amount of associate producers on a film in the history of the world, ever. Blew it out the window. The second thing we’ve done is we’re the only way you can watch this film is if you have a screening because community, community, community is critical. I don’t wanna even give you the option to watch it on YouTube on your couch. You need to see it with other moms. So you’re all like, Oh my God. And then we do something.

There’s already 1,400 screenings in the country, all across the country, everywhere. And it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you share a lot about your own family, your struggles on having a child and how you’re raising these two boys now. But I wonder like, as we’ve talked about the struggles of how we define womanhood and femininity, there seems to be this other conversation also happening simultaneously about what it is to be a boy, what it is to be a man, what it means to be masculine.

SAUJANI: You see this happening a little bit on the right right now, where the way they kind of take down men is by telling them they’re too feminine, that they’re weak. It’s almost like the worst thing that you can say to a man is call ’em a woman. Isn’t that interesting? Right? And so I think we’re in this moment of real traditionalism where we’re trying to box women into categories, and we’re trying to box men into categories. And it’s the same con, it’s the same fight. It’s like, give us choice. I thought what was so powerful was the couple at the end in the film that we’re, you know, working more conservative and he was basically like, Hey, well we’re I stay, I am the one who does most of the childcare. That’s what works for our family.

SREENIVASAN: Soundup from film.

SAUJANI: And I was like, Exactly. Right? Like, let people decide for themselves what works for their family and stop trying to put people into boxes.

SREENIVASAN: You know, let’s say somebody attends one of these thousand plus screenings around the country at the end of this, and how you start the conversation of what’s next. What do you suggest to them? What do you propose to them? Is there legislation they should be opting for? Is there a particular person they should contact? What, what do they do?

SAUJANI: We have to actively rebuild our muscles to not participate in these culture wars. So when we’re about to like, you know, judge somebody or shame them, like to pull back and remember, let them make choices that are good for them, that doesn’t mean that I need to make the same thing. So like, we need to like, remove ourselves from participation in the culture wars. And I think that that would go a long way.

I think the second thing is, you know, I want people to, you know, I wanna walk out of these screenings, walk out of these mo this movement with hundreds of thousands of more supporters and voters that are childcare worker or childcare voters. Like, I think that we have an opportunity in the midterms and beyond to get childcare legislation both federally and in the states. Like I said, like the economic headwinds are with us. 76% of Americans, regardless of party, want this. Like, we’re so close to there that I want this film and what ha — the community that’s being built outta this film, the movement that’s being ignited from this film to push it over the edge, and I know it will.

SREENIVASAN: The film is called “No Country For Mothers.” It’s screening around the United States now, executive producer and the CEO of Moms First Reshma Saujani, thanks so much for joining us.

SAUJANI: Thank you for having me.