You Shouldn’t Have to Choose Between Work and Motherhood With Reshma Saujani

You're listening to Good inside with Dr. Becky. Today's episode is one you're not going to want to miss, right after a word from our sponsor. Hi, I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside. I'm a clinical psychologist and mom of three on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children. I love translating deep thoughts about parenting into practical, actionable strategies that you can use in your home right away. One of my core beliefs is that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us in that moment. So even as we struggle and even as we are having a hard time on the outside, we remain Good inside. I have Reshma Sojani on the podcast today and I am so excited for you all to hear this conversation. Reshma is the CEO and founder of Girls who Code, a nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in technology. She's also the author of a new book, Pay the Future of Women and Work. About a year ago, I reached out and dmed Reshma to introduce myself. And from there we couldn't stop talking about all things motherhood, work taking up space and policy. In today's episode, Reshma and I discuss the current state of the workplace for women and mothers and and her plan to help more mothers be both in the workforce and involve caregivers. Hey, two things can be true, right? With all that in mind, let's jump in. Hi Reshma. So good to see you today.

So great to see you.

I would love to begin for you just first to introduce yourself to the listeners. I'm sure many of our listeners know who you are, have read some of your work. But for those who haven't or need a refresh, tell us about you and the things you're interested in.

Well, I guess first, I am a mom of two, two and seven and a dog mom. Stanley can never forget her. I've spent the past 10 years building a nonprofit called Girls who Code, which I founded in Gosh, 2012. I written a couple of books. My newest book is out shortly called Pay up the future of Women in Work and why it's different than you think. And it was inspired by my next movement that I'm building, the Marshall Plan for Moms, which is trying to make sure that we have the right public and private strategies to make sure that women recover from the economic crisis. So just a lot of stuff.

Yeah, just like, you know, the average kind of walk in the park, you know. No, you really kind of always, I feel like hit the nail on the head and say it how it is. And you're such a powerful spokesperson for change for women. And I feel really grateful that our paths crossed a little while ago and that I could rope you into coming on this podcast.

Yeah, it was so funny when we started DMA on Instagram that weekend. Like, I was with a girlfriend, talking.

About it slid into your DMs, right?

Slid into my DMs. And I was probably complaining about, like, my husband and the unpaid labor and the kids. And she was like, do you know this woman Dr. Becky? And I remember pulling out my phone, like, oh, my God, she's following me. And it was just so. But it was so crazy. And then you emailed me, and so it was like, this was meant to be kismet.

We're meant to be here 100%. So what's on your mind today? I kind of trust that that's gonna lead us in a really good place.

Gosh. You know, I think what's in my mind right now is workplaces. And, you know, we just got the notification that masks are coming off of schools and in restaurants. And it's interesting because in some ways, I feel like schools are going to be ahead of workplaces. It feels like we're, like, turning a corner in this pandemic. But every working mom I know is just burnt out and exhausted and broken and struggling with, you know, her mental health, her time, what's happened to her kids. And so I'm really thinking about recovery post Covid and thinking about, like, what our workplace is going to look like. What are our lives going to look like? I don't know about you, Becky, but, like, I've had, like, moments of reflection and, like, who do I want to be when I get out of this? And, like, am I going to hear myself? Am I going to be that person? So that's what's on my mind.

I totally hear that. That really, really resonates now. We're just recovery, right? Yeah. We've been in two years of this chronic stress, chronic uncertainty, chronic that didn't go the way I wanted it to go. And so many hours of caring for our children. Right. I always feel like, as parents, of course, yeah, we care for our children, but when they get to a certain age, you've kind of mentally prepared for a certain number of hours. Your week being away from your kids. That's kind of been built into expectations in parenting, at least here in America. Right. And then all of a sudden, parents have parented their kids for so many more hours. Than they usually do, right?

Yes. This is one of the things in writing my book, Pay Up, I learned that we spend more time with our kids than single moms did in the 1970s. And so we have this clash. I mean, you wonder why this burnout is happening. Because we have this clash of being an ideal mother and an ideal worker in the age of intensive parenting, and it's colliding and it's crashing, and we're feeling it. And Covid really broke that open for, like, the whole world to see.

I want to go into that further. So let's take those two buckets, right? You and I both kind of have our hands out for everyone here to visualize, like, one on our right side, one on our left, and we have the ideal worker and the ideal mother. And I would love to kind of get a little bit into the qualities of each. My guess is there's not a ton of overlap, but I think it speaks to why probably so much of this is so overwhelming. All of these qualities we're supposed to be accessing at once.

So let's talk about the ideal worker, right? And I mean, book. I took a little bit about the history. It's like, women were never meant to be in workplaces. The only reason why we got in was, like, World War II. The men were off to war. They kind of had to let us in, right, so the country could function. And then when the men came back, they tried to, like, push us out again and, like, sell us Tupperware and appliances to, like, you know what I mean? To. To make us feel, quote, fulfilled. And so we have always been battling to be in workplaces and also to be mothers in workplaces. That's why you've, you know, Pregnancy Discrimination act, equal Pay act, all these laws that were put into place to essentially allow working women to work. And so, you know, we learned very early on, right, that, like, we had to hide our motherhood, that to basically have a place in the workplace, we had to pretend we weren't mothers. And so we never put pictures of our kids up on our desks. We apologize when we had to leave when our kids were sick. You know, we missed every soccer game, every recital, every everything. You know, I think about myself. You know, I talk about. You know, it's like what I call the big lie of corporate feminism. It's like we're told that if we just, you know, girl bossed and leaned in our way, we'd get that corner express train to the corner office. And I bought into that lie and When I think about, you know, I finally had my first child, Sean, after more miscarriages than I can count. I missed him crawling. I didn't see him walk. I didn't hear his first words. I was on two to three planes a week. I spent 30 minutes with him a day, maximum. And I really thought that that's what it was going to take to build Girls who Code and to build this movement. And old Becky and I would get annoyed when I was in. When I was speaking to groups of young women, and they'd say, Mr. Johnny, Mr. Johnny, how do you balance work and, you know, motherhood? And I would literally wave them off. Don't ask me that question. And so, because I really believed that you could just, you know, color code your calendar, you know, get your mentor and sponsor and, like, you could make it. And like, motherhood was. I don't want to call it. It was going to be something that was just happening in the background. Right.

Were you going to say inconvenience or. No?

I was. I was going to say an inconvenience, but I. It's. I struggle with this, Becky, because I always wanted to be a mom, and I've always been, like, had high ambition for social change. And so this conflict that I had was very much. I mean, you're nodding your head because probably you did, too, is very front and center of every decision that I made leading up to this point. I was going to marry the right person. I was going to marry a feminist. I was going to make sure we had all of those conversations beforehand. Like, I wasn't going to let the kids that I desperately wanted get in the way of the change that I wanted to make. And Covid threw me for a loop.

Can you. Can you say more?

Well, because, you know, I woke up January 2020, girls, Dakota Super bowl ad. I was going to have a newborn baby via surrogate. And I was really, you know, I have autoimmune issues, and so I couldn't carry my second child. And I was feeling the pain of that. Meaning, like, I was really looking forward because I didn't have him in the womb. I didn't have baby psy in my womb that I wanted to spend this time. I had everything planned out, right? My maternity leave laid out. And COVID 19, happened, and I found myself having to go back to work when Cy was a couple weeks old after I had got him home in the middle of a pandemic. And, you know, I was running a women and girls organization. So when pandemics hit or, you know, global crisis has hit. It's the first resources to go are to women and girls. My entire leadership team were mostly moms of young children. And so we were just done every day. I was just broken. And again, and I had resources. And for a lot of us, we were saying, I remember saying this, we're talking about what our KPIs were going to be, whether we were going to meet some goals. And we said, you know what, we can't deal with this now because we're zoom schooling all our kids. When September happens and the schools open, we'll make these decisions. You're shaked, right, with your company.

Oh, my goodness. I just think my friends and I always joke, like if someone back in March was like, here's how like long this is going to be. Here's how many points, you know, you're going to think it's over and it's not. We would just. You literally couldn't have dealt with it. So, like, you had to go. It's like when I used to run and I used to say, I'm only running to there. And then I'd like give myself the next point. That's all I could do.

Yeah, it was wild, but we really thought that. And so you kind of let it. Trudging along, trudging along, exhausted, broken, all these things. And then I remember in September, my son goes to public school here in New York City. You get that note being like, guess what? We've launched hybrid learning where you're going to, you know, get to, you know, log on your kid at 9 o', clock, 10 o'. Clock. All the while you maintain your full time job. And you know, Becky, I naively thought was like, what? You're not going to ask me if I got time? Because at this point, right, of course, a man had to come up with hybrid learning. But they knew who was doing the homeschooling between March. They knew it was us and they knew what was going to happen to us.

Can you speak to that? Just because I know from your book, which I got to read early, and so much of your other work, like just some numbers, some statistics, but everyone here might be like, well, yeah, what do we know? What happened to women? Yeah.

So 11 million women left the workforce from the beginning of the pandemic till now. At some point, you've had the largest exodus of women leaving the labor market in the history of our nation in December of 2020. Right. Like literally all the jobs lost were women. In the latest jobs report that just Came out a few weeks ago. Men have entered the workforce at 27 times that of women. There's still 1.1 million women missing in the labor force. That doesn't count the amount of us who are probably listening to this call that have downshifted their career, changed their career, moved from full time to consulting. Right. Traded in their dreams. Right. It's. It doesn't account for any of that. And so because we were doing the unpaid labor at home, the cooking and the cleaning, the caretaking, and because daycare centers were shut down, grandparents couldn't come in and take care of our kids, we had to balance what we always knew were two and a half jobs. The job that we were doing at home and the one that was over there in the middle of just trying to keep ourselves and our children alive. And what we forget, we need to remember is at the beginning of the pandemic, the first time in the history of our nation, women were the 51% of the labor force. We were like popping champagne, celebrating as feminists. We had gotten there, and then in nine months, we had rolled back almost 20 years of progress gone.

Yeah, those numbers are just staggering. I mean, they really, really are in terms of the magnitude of that and like you said, how long it's taken for women to take up space, you know, in that world. And then the pandemic hits. And the demands of taking care of children during a pandemic are demands that you can't say no to. Like, somebody has to be doing it. Somebody has to be there. And now here we are, two years later, and, you know, it's interesting. I feel like there's a number of parents, I should just say, I know, who maybe have downshifted their job or no longer in the workforce, who feel like they've had an aha moment during it, that that's what they are choosing, that's what they're wanting. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, oh, well, I don't see it in such a negative way for me, I know I speak for me and Reshma saying, there's no. There's no one right way to be a parent or be an adult. And there's a lot of parents and a lot of women who felt like, I had no choice, I had no choice, and here I am.

Well, that's the future, right? The future is to be able to go in and out of the workforce without penalty, to say, you know what? Covid actually gave me an opportunity to, you know, to quit that job. I hated to spend time with my kids, and I love it. And maybe I want to go back in a couple years, but when I go back, I don't want to be penalized, you know what I mean, for the time that I spent out of the workforce. That's what screwed up, right, about the current system. It never gave women freedom to move in and out without penalty. And so that's what's so gut wrenching right about this moment.

You lose.

Do you know, Becky, you lose 40% of your salary if you miss more than one year of work. 40%. And wow, I think that we have a once in a lifetime opportunity here. So you have the great resignation. As we know, millions and millions of people quit every month. What interesting is the vast, you know, more women are quitting than men, right? And they're quitting. Sometimes they're quitting because they don't have childcare and they're downshifting. They can't have a job. Sometimes they're quitting because, like, I hated that job and I want something else or I want to work at a place that's not saying, come back to work. Now that's actually offering me flexibility and the ability to, like, pick my kids up from school, you know, with, again, without penalty. And that's happening at the moment that we have this massive talent war where we are short, you know what I mean? Retail workers, nurses, teachers, you name it, engineers. And so I think that working women have a lot of leverage right now if we see it that way. And so when we think about all the reasons why we got pushed out of the workforce, can we now have workplaces that provide those things to us? So I talk about nine things in my book that I think that employers should start providing and we should start asking for. And I'll just talk about three. So the first thing is subsidizing childcare. So most parents pay more for childcare than they pay for their mortgage. It is the most expensive, expensive line item that a family has. And the way we have historically talked about childcare is like, this is your personal problem for you to solve. But what we must understand from this pandemic is that it is an economic issue.

It is really interesting. Like, you get a job and you're like, well, to go to my job, so who's gonna watch my kids? Like, oh, right, like, I need to figure that out.

We've always talked about childcare as your personal problem that you have to solve. What we know now that it is an economic problem that the government or Your employer has to help provide. It is like health care.

Yes.

And we have to start talking about it like it's like health care. And I think we actually have a. My goal, Becky, is to literally, right now, 10% of companies subsidize some form of child care. I want to get to 100%. And I don't think it's crazy. Moms who are kind of, again, able to kind of move with their feet from where they want to work should be saying, hey, so what are your childcare benefits?

I hear that. And this is such a nice intersection right. Between our work, where someone's saying, oh, like, I could ask for that, or I could say, I need that. Right. Because there's a lot of women listening here, I'm guessing, and men. There's a ton of listeners here who probably are wondering, huh, that has been something that's held me back. And I have gotten to that point and then just figured. Cause this is something I hear a lot. It basically costs me as much in childcare as I would get paid in the job. Or it's just a little bit of a difference. Quote, it's not worth it. Right. And it's the reason so many women are out of the workforce.

Yep.

Right. I hear that at least anecdotally. Right. So what do you say to women who said, like, oh, I can. I can ask that? Or like, is that something I could do?

Yes, you can. And we have to ask for it together. Men have to ask for that. You know what I mean? Childless women have to ask for that. You know, we're the lowest birth rate we've had in the history of our nation is because young women look at us and they say, no, thank you. Right. No, thank you.

That. That looks hard. That looks hard.

And what I say to them is like, don't let them take your choice away from you. Don't let them take your. If you don't want to be a mother, fine. You choose, though. Don't let them choose for you. And so I do think it's something that we can start asking for. And from a public policy perspective, we have to start saying to companies, this is something that you have to start providing. This is something that you. Because we also know it's like pre K education, that. That early investment, you know what I mean? Making sure that kids have good childcare is good for society. So it makes sense.

Yeah, it's so good for society. And. Right. I kind of grew my new business Good. Inside during the pandemic. Right. It started during the pandemic. And same thing here. We're right now, we're a team of 12, right? Full time. And me and my co founder and a lot of the other senior people here are moms, right. And a lot of us actually weren't working full time before the pandemic, so we did the opposite. We all, like, you know, really, really ramped up our working hours. And the truth is, without childcare, you can't be the present employee, the motivated employee, because you are overwhelmed, in a state of threat like, where's my kid? What do I need to do? You're spinning. Yeah, Right. And so, yes, huge long term benefit, especially right now.

So I got, you know, my son Sean, 7, and this pandemic has created a lot of anxiety for him. He's constantly eating his clothes, right. My second son sai two years old, the only word he can say is mama. I got a speech therapist and he's like, you know, negative percent in weight and I gotta take him to like a gastrologist. So my point is like, that's Covid. And a lot of us kids are a little broken and need our time and I want to give them my time. And I shouldn't have to choose between my job and my kid. If we're really talking about COVID recovery, we need to talk about this. And we know that the ones that are going to be making the speech appointment, seeing what happens, doing the gastrologist, talking about anxiety, are moms. And that's cool, right? And we want dads to start doing more and they will start doing more. But in the interim, while we're getting to gender equality and caretaking, we gotta provide support to moms, you know what I mean, in doing this. And that is a responsibility. It is unfair to say. Employers say, well, just come back to work, right? Come back to work five days a week. It's like you're just not acknowledging the trauma that moms have been through and that our children have been through.

Yeah. So that's point one. I know you're going to give us some more points.

So my second big favorite thing is incentivizing men to take paid leave. You know, there's still companies like Apple that doesn't have gender neutral paid leave. And when they do offer paid leave, they gaslight men for taking it. And here's the thing. Dads want to take care of their kids. I know so many dads who were like, part of the reason why they quit is because their company wasn't offering flexibility and they wanted to walk their kids to school, you know, and so we have in these past two years, I think men are doing more caretaking and so, and it's leading to lower diabetes, less heart attacks, you know, better health outcomes for men. So how are we changing that and getting more men to take paid leave? Like I know in my marriage, you know, my husband and all feminist, when we got married, you know, he was cooking and cleaning and doing everything. And then we had a baby and I took leave and he didn't take as much leave. My to do list went like this, this went like this. And we are literally in couples therapy after that forever to just resolve what started from paid leave. And, and, and I know a lot of couples like this. So if we are creating corporate policies that are exacerbating gender equality at home, we gotta change that. And we got to acknowledge a corporation's policies play a role in the gender ratio of unpaid labor at home.

If more men were home for those first number of weeks living and breathing by the nap schedule, or the feeding or the eczema or the diaper changes, Right. Fast forward to when the kid is six months or nine months, they're probably not asking the questions because it's also woven into their fabric of being a father 100%.

Like, my sister had her first child when both her and her husband were residents. He took time alone, took care of the baby, then she took time. So he, he. And now it's like he, they do have, you know, 50, 50 in terms of like how they of caretaking. Because like you said, it was firsthand knowledge for him. He did it.

Yeah, yeah.

And so he didn't have to ask questions.

Right. You know, it's something I say to parents a lot about how kids learn regulation. How do they learn to stay calm when they're really, really upset, or at least not to throw blocks when they're really, really upset. As a starting point, and I always say it's coming up for me now, kids don't learn from lecture or from words. Kids learn from experience. You have to experience something to know it. Because knowing is inside our own body. No one can put that into you. And that's coming up for me and what you're really talking about, to have men really more involved in so much of this kind of at home labor. Right. Essentially they have to experience it. You can't really sit down with a partner, even a well meaning partner, and say, here's the nap schedule, here's the feeding schedule. This is what they eat. If it's just On a list, you know, it would be like my friend who's, I don't know, a radiologist, you know, walking me through an outline of how to read a mammogram. I'd be like, okay, I still don't know how to do it. Like, you seem to be really trying to explain it, but I still don't know. But if I had gone through residency, I. I would know how to do it, right? And I think just for. Again, like, this community here, and I know so many people are probably nodding their heads like, yes. That is so my experience, my partnership, right? We have to get our partners to try things, to experiment things. And I know in my case, freshman, I don't know you. For me, I have kind of the best outcomes with that when I then leave, especially when my kids are younger, right? Cause I'd be like, oh, no, don't do the diaper that way. And I was like, wait, Becky, if someone asked me to do more, and then they were, like, on top of me, I'd be pretty disincentivized. So get out. Yes, leave.

And leave without instructions. So I went on a girls trip last week, and it was funny. So I. I left and went on my girls trip. I didn't. I didn't, you know, order the groceries before. I didn't make a list. I didn't pack any bags. I just bounced. You know what I mean? Like, see you later. Have a great time. I needed to train, like you said in the hall, just do it on his own. Figure it out. But the more you leave the instructions, the more. The more they be. They depend on you. And, you know, one of the things in Covid which was really fascinating is I think for a long time I told myself, well, he just doesn't know how much I do. And as they watched us do the laundry in between, again, our meetings, our work, our this, and our that, and it didn't change anything. You realized it was. Well, not that you don't know what I do, but one, you know that I'm always just going to keep doing it, and two, it's that that work is not valued. And that is also what needs to change. Because I think what's so hard is it goes back to the kind of this performative parenting that you see on Instagram. You know, all of us thought we were buying into these equal marriages, and then when we didn't, it was our shame, our problem. I was just interviewed by a prominent journalist, and as I was talking about this, she goes, well, why don't you just tell him to do more. No, no, no, no, no. Don't give me one more thing. You know what I mean, that I have to do or don't make me feel like I just didn't raise my husband right. It's not my fault. It's society's fault, and it's not my problem to fix. And it's like, I love what you say about leaving, because I do the same thing. I gotta create boundaries. Mm.

You know, me and my good friend have been talking about this idea of just taking up space, that if you have a partner and you feel like, wow, they take up so much space, they just take up the space and they do their thing. Right? And an antidote to that a little bit is. Is not just convincing them why that's not okay, or trying to tell them that you need more space, but actually taking up space. And that's really uncomfortable for a lot of us. Right. And that doesn't have to be something hostile for everyone listening. It could be actually explaining it to your partner, you know, in a calm moment. Hey, I've realized I so often don't get to do so many of the things I want to do for myself, and I then end up feeling overwhelmed. I actually feel resentful. And I've realized that I need to do a better job setting boundaries. And so I'm thinking this weekend, and then whatever it is you. You want to do that you name, right? Maybe if you're rational. This weekend, I'm going away. I'm just leaving. Okay. I'm going on a girls trip. Right. Which is amazing. I have one coming up in May. And it's so true when we think we're, quote, helping. I'm gonna set you up. I'm gonna plan all the play dates. First of all, I would say rationment for both of us. You have to read our friend Evrodsky's book. She will go over that in detail. Why that's not a great setup. But also, we get in someone's way of feeling competent. Feeling competent, we actually deprive someone of competence, which is the thing that allows you to take on more and more. When someone kind of knows, essentially, they're kind of just the puppet, you know, running the show.

You know, the reason why it's so important to dismantle this is that it becomes our individual problem and not something systematic that exists. The reason why we don't have gender equality at home is not our problem. It's. Society has set it up that way. And so to Dismantle it, You know, to fix it. Right. We have got to demand the structure to change. You know, I mean, don't, you know, don't fix the woman, fix the system.

It makes me think about kind of psychology and sociology. Right. Psychology looks at an individual and why we are the way we are and how we became that way and how in my mind, we can work on shifting things that were put in place at one point to protect us, but now work against us. Right. And we're talking also about these huge sociological factors. Right. And right now, at this point, parental leave. Right. Women who have babies take parental leave. They take all of it. Right. And part of the issue, even around the kind of gender inequality of at home labor, isn't just a woman's difficulty speaking up to a partner. It's the systemic sociological pattern of men having a baby and then showing up to work the next day. Yeah.

Society doesn't want to accept this. It's so funny how we've been talking about, for example, the gender pay gap for so long. There is. And we've been talking about the gender pay gap as the pay gap between men and women. The pay gap is not between men and women. It's between mothers and fathers.

Hmm.

It's the motherhood bias that causes the pay gap.

The pay gap isn't between men and women. It's between mothers and fathers.

In fact, the largest pay gap is between mothers and childless women. Hmm. We are penalized.

Companies love childless women.

They do. Well. And again, going back to like, hey, can I really go ask for childcare? You know? Yeah. You don't know why, because guess what, they're paying you to freeze your eggs and your museum tickets.

But that's interesting that women. And you spoke about this, Reshma, that you really wanted to be a mom. Like, you knew that and you had kind of these other, these other social justice goals as well, and wanting to have a child and care for a child, and the way you become interested in people's stories and their experiences and your relationships, those are all qualities that actually really benefit a workplace.

Yeah.

But you're saying when kids become involved. Oh, kind of now, now you're giving some of those traits to your own kids. Now you're sharing me with, you know, now you're distracted.

Now your performance is gonna, your performance is gonna suffer because of it. And it's also because you don't see that men doing the same. Or when they do, they're like, oh, that's so cute. You brought your kid to work right?

Right.

It's cultural bias. And I think part of it is, like, we. It's ingrained in us. You know, it's funny. I wanted to tell you a story. It's. You know, a couple months ago, my son Sean brought home his portfolio. And so in his portfolio, he has to describe his mother, what she does, and his father and his father, what she does. Mind you, pre Covid, I literally would take Sean. You know, I gave a speech at Harvard commencement. There's Sean. You know what I mean? I did a daily show there, Shawn. I took him everywhere. Part of it is because I wanted him to know that his mom was a badass boss and that I wanted the other young women who I work for to also know that you don't have to choose. But the past few years, I've been doing all the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and this. You know, all of that, right? And being a boss upstairs in zoom. And so he takes out his portfolios. He's so proud, right? And he writes. My mom takes. Does my laundry and takes care of me and my brother. My dad is an engineer. And I open it up, and I am like. My heart just sinks. And I am like, don't say anything. You know, I go to bed at night, and I can't sleep. Now, mind you, again, this is the middle of me building Marshall Plan for Mom and pay up, right? So I know better. And the next morning, I wake up, and I'm like, sean, come here. I need to talk to you. And I sit him down. I said, you know what your mom does, right? He's like, what do you mean, mom? I said, you know that your mom has a job, right? What is my job? Say my job. Tell me my job. I'm getting all crazy, right? And he basically, you know, starts, like, hyperventilating a little, right? And I'm like, okay, Sean, I want you to know that mom fights for women and girls. You know, CEO of Girls who Coach. Remember Girls who Coach? You remember? Brave and perfect. And he's like, yes, Mommy. Yes, Mommy. Yes, Mommy. And I'm like, okay. You know? And I'm just, like, hot, right? So I, like, go out, walk the dog, and, you know, I come back, and my husband has just come back, and Sean is furiously scratching out his portfolio. And my husband's giving me a look like, what did you do? And so he's literally erasing. Tell me, Mommy, what you do again. Tell me what you're doing. And I am so ashamed, Becky, right? Because that was the girl boss in me not wanting my son. The value of me should be my CEO Ness, not my motherhood. And it was like I was like, what have I done? Because, to be honest, the proudest title I have is Mother.

It's what you started with when I.

Asked you to introduce yourself. But again, this goes back to how deeply ingrained it is, even in us.

Yes, yes. And, you know, it's interesting, Reshma, as you tell me that, and thank you for sharing that with me and for all of us. You know, the thing I'm reacting to, and I wonder if this was at all what you reacted to and why it kind of brought up this angry response was, I feel like you do so much for women around not not having to choose. Like, why do we have to choose between being a mom, a perfectly satisfied mom, or a perfectly satisfied girl boss? Right. Why do we have to choose? And I talk a lot about this idea of two things are true. I feel like it's the answer to every difficult question. Of course, then implementing that is tricky. But we don't have to choose between being connected and warm with our kids and also having firm boundaries. Right. As soon as you think there's an either or, it's a good time to pause and say, wait, how could I do both? And your son, like, kind of saw you in one way. Right. It was one part of you. And I feel like for you, and knowing you, having both parts be there is, like, very core to who you are. Like, almost having just one identified, maybe it would have been a little easier to identify with the my mom's a girl boss. Right. Kind of Part. But having both parts are so it's like, so you.

Absolutely, Absolutely. And the fact that he did that from his father, he said he was an engineer and he takes care of me, us. So I think that's also what it's like. His dad got to be both, but I just had to be one.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's kind of like, again, a reflection of society. We are applaud men for being dads and also being, you know, whatever, workers, you know, bosses. But for moms, it's almost like either or. It's like when they say you can have a job or a kid, but you can't have both. And you're right. I want both. Like, I want both.

I want both, too. So I want. And I'm dying to hear your third point because you said you were gonna share three, and I've only gotten two so far. I can count. Okay. I want that other one.

Well, the third is really like, moms are burnt out. Like, we're broken, we're traumatized, we're exhausted. And I think companies have to recognize that and value us for more than just our output. Like, it's almost like we don't allow moms to be vulnerable in this moment. And I think the whole, like, I don't know a mom who's gotten a memo from an employer being like, what do you need? We just had this omnicron. Schools are closed or open now. They're open. Like, your kids are broken. What do you need? Never got the memo. So it's like this lack of acknowledgement that something has happened to mothers. You know, CDC just, you know, released a report a week ago that the two subgroups that are the most broken have the most kind of mental health, you know, issues, anxiety, depression, are 18 to 24 year olds and moms, go change the world. Forget that this. Something has just happened to you and to moms were saying, continue to do like, be the social safety net of America and forget that something has happened to you. It's a sense of like, I can't show up authentically and show and just take a beat. Yeah. That is breaking us and breaking our hearts right now. I think what people want right now are family values. People are quitting in the great resignation, not because they don't want to work. They don't want to work for you. And they're literally men and women. All the studies show they want to work at places that allow them to be parents or allow them to take care of their pets or like, you know, I mean, their mental health or their elderly parents, you know what I mean? Or themselves and to work. The hustle culture is dead now. Yeah. I think there's going to be. There's resistance to that. Right. That's why this, like, come to work now. Come to work now. And, you know, we all, we. It's like we have this. Our mayor saying, get out of your pajamas. I'm like, really? Like. But so. But we have to fight against it because it's this again, you know, pressure to go back to an old system that wasn't working and that none of us will go back to. And it's again, a lot of women are going back to the work and then quitting again.

Well, I think I speak for all of us in saying I really mean this, that we are so fortunate to have you as such a key leader in that change and to lead us. I like to end my episodes by kind of tying things Up a little bit or giving people three takeaways. And sometimes I do that on my own, but you're here, so. So let's do it live. So I'm gonna give you one and three, and I'm gonna take number two.

Oh, my God.

So first thing you want someone to kind of leave with or think about after this?

I think the first thing is, like, never waste a good crisis. And, you know, ask yourself, like, how do you want your workplace to start paying up?

And I think number two is a little mantra to help you. Maybe speak up or ask those questions. Right? Some version of, I'm allowed to want things for myself. I'm allowed to take up space. That's something I'd encourage you to say to yourself. You can even try to say it out loud to a mirror. And if you notice panic, if you notice tears, I really mean this. Nothing is wrong with you. That's a sign that you're sending your body a very different message than it's used to being sent. And what I would do with that is say, okay, something powerful is happening. Maybe I'll practice again. Maybe I'll take one more baby step from there. That's how change takes. But that intense reaction is just such a sign you're doing something new.

And I would say the third thing is you're not alone and you're not crazy. Like, we have all been dealt a big lie, that if we just leaned in hard enough and we just color coded our calendar and got a mentor, that we'd be like, you know, we get there, we get to a quality, and when we're not there, we're like, what's wrong with us? Well, we were never going to get there. Right? And so, one, you know, give yourself grace and realize you're not alone. And, you know, realize that, like, we have an opportunity, you know, to do it again differently. You know, you and I, Becky, are fortunate because we are social entrepreneurs. We set the culture of our organizations. We can set our schedules. And I want that for every woman. You know, whether you are working in retail at Walmart or whether you are in the corner office at a law firm, we have a moment right now to change it.

Yes, two things can be true. And what you just said, I think just has to be said again to everyone listening. You are not crazy. You are not making this up. The system isn't working. It's never worked. It definitely isn't working now. And the system has to shift for those changes to actually result in the larger changes we're looking for. So Reshma, thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to Good Inside. I love co creating episodes with you based on the real life tricky situations in your family. To share what's happening in your home, you can call 646-598-2543 or email a voice note to goodinsidepodcastmail.com There are so many more strategies and tips I want to share with you. Head to goodinside.com and sign up for Good Insider, my free weekly email with scripts and strategies delivered right to your inbox and follow me on Instagram and Facebook. Dr. Beckyoodinside for a daily dose of parenting and self care ideas. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Beth Rowe and Marie Cecile Anderson, an executive produced by Erica Belsky and me, Dr. Becky if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review it or share this episode with a friend or family member as a way to start an important conversation. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves. Even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain Good Inside.