The activist tarana burke describes her as a truth teller and builder of movements. We have seen that with her work with a nonprofit she founded to close the gender gap in technology. Her commitment to Technology Helped her launch a National Movement to center her commitment to economic recovery and her policy that supports moms. Gender equality is at the heart of this. The pandemic made it clear to her and millions of women that workplaces were never built for working mothers to have a fair chance and that is why we saw historic number of women leave their jobs in 2021, highlighting that it is the system that needs to be fixed. They offer a plan to educate corporate leaders, advocate for policy reform and reimagine our workplaces. She will be having this conversation with the executive editor of the Washington Post, the first woman to lead the 140 fouryearold news organization. Previously, she was the executive editor and senior vp of the associated press. Later we will take some of your questions and you can submit those using the q and a button at the bottom of your window. We are including a link to purchase copies of the book with autographs in the checkbox. Thanks for joining us. Please give a warm welcome to both of them into your homes. Hi hi everyone, it is great to be with all of you and thank you for joining us today. It is so nice to see you again even if it is virtually like this and talk to you about all of these important issues you are raising in this new book. Thank you, sally. I know a lot is happening in life and the world so for you to take the time to be here to talk about women and working women means a lot for everything will person who is participating. Thank you, that is very kind. There is no more important issue in our world. The title of the book is pay up the future of women and work and how it is different than you think. How is it different . Workplaces never made from women. Millions of women have left the workforce. The largest exodus of women leaving the workforce. Many women say they are anxious and depressed. The groups that are the most at risk are 18 to 24yearolds and moms. So we have this opportunity to finally make workplaces work for us. Because they never have. You right in the book that there is anything there is a feeling we are colluding with our own erasure. We are squeezed or do we squeeze ourselves into a guilt cone, with the contradictory demands of childrearing and professional ambition. Because wasnt having it all what we asked for . Im curious what you think this all came to a head during the pandemic. Was it always happening . Why did it come to the head and the pandemic . I think it was always happening. I did my book party with Hillary Clinton and she was talking about this. Ever since she entered the workforce, she said dont have pictures of your kids, dont talk about your motherhood. So the only way we could show up at work was hiding half of ourselves. The problem is that corporate feminism bought into this. I bought into this. I spent the past decade telling girls to lean in, grow boss her way to the top. And covid, i found myself with two little kids running an organization and it broke me. And i have resources. So we learned that having it all is really a euphemism for doing it all. It was something about covid, whether being at home for our kids, zoom schooling, knowing we would be the beneficiaries of that work. And no one cared. So the way we have been doing it, telling women to get a sponsor, colorcode their calendar, that was not getting us to equality. We were fighting the wrong fight. The fight we should have been fighting is how do we get to equality at home . How do we create structures so we can stop trying to fix the woman and fix the system . Yes, that idea of fixing the woman versus the system is very much at the heart of this. Many of us are asked how do you do what you do is if we are somehow superhero people who if they could figure out what we do to work, many of us would get asked that question and was that a good bit of advice . So talk to me a little bit about that, do people approach you with that . I need to change to make this work . Is that something you hear . All the time. I why women show up, i spend my life tried to get more girls in technology and the amount of women at m. I. T. , phd, the last question they will ask is i feel a guy dont belong here. Why my exhausted . And its when they are doing two thirds of the caregiving work. I think we thought that was the way. I have spent almost a decade trying to have a baby. When i finally did, i was on two planes into two trains every week trying to build the movement. I do not see him take his first steps, i do not seem crawl, i do not hear him say his first words. And i would look at myself in the mirror and say that is the price you have to pay for changing the world. And that should not be a price we have to pay. If we want to work or make a difference. So what we have been doing has come at a huge cost. I think where it is showing up right now is not even just for labor market and the numbers of women in the workforce. It is the Mental Health peace that should terrify all of us. Are there any companies who are doing it right . Is there anything you see on a private level, that is helpful or hopeful for the future . I think there are companies who have done a little better in the pandemic. I worry were going backwards, though. Once we get everybody returned to the office. But yeah, Companies Like disney and patagonia have onsite daycare to help with childcare issues. There are more companies that are offering paid leave and benefits and sixday benefits. There are some companies that have pushed back against flexibility and Remote Working and say we are going to make it possible for people to work wherever it works for them. So i think there is a trend. What i worry about is there are also trends that go back to the old normal. From our president , joe biden to my mayor eric adams to say get out of your pajamas and go to work. We are still not talking about the fact that the latest jobs numbers, 27 times more men enter the job market and we are still missing millions of women. And black women have the lowest Unemployment Rate in 50 years. It is all about a lot about the cost of childcare. What would a new definition of working motherhood look like for different groups . Obviously there are privileged white women, women of color. How would you think through or think about what this means for different groups and women with different Life Experiences at this moment in time . Three out of 10 American Families are missing a mom. When i think about when i built it, i went to refugee camps. I which of the poorest communities and i said i can teach her, i can teach anybody. When we get to workplaces, we designed them for white men who had a partner staying at home doing the domestic work. We did not design them for a single mom, isnt a woman of color that is an hourly wage worker. And we need to. We have an opportunity to do that right now. I think companies should be providing the same paid leave benefits across the board. If you have women in factories and the front office, they should get the same benefits. It should not matter the color of your skin or how much money you make, an indicator of how you get to spend time with your kids and raise your kids. That is fundamentally broken in our country. It should not be about privilege. That is dictating your ability to have a job or be a mother. But the u. S. Has long been an outlier on health care in general. The system you described happens in some countries, maybe not perfectly but it happens. Do you have a plan for moms . What would be a realistic step forward . In the United States . What are the elements of what that needs to be . Six month ago i wouldve said past build back better. Past paid leave, extend the Child Tax Credit. Those things were providing relief for working families when we have them. And it still shocks me that we are bailing out airlines but not moms. All of the evidence and data and all of the pain that politicians of one party are already facing at the ballot box, but they still cant grow a part. That tells me there is something fundamentally that we need to shift in our culture. I was talking to doing a panel with some Senior Executives in canada and some Senior Executives in canada and france. What maybe almost crying is in canada, postpandemic it is we have more women. And that is because you have health care. You have paid leave. When you start encouraging families to share in the Domestic Labor and provide support to single parents, and is actually good for the economy, our health and our children. The fact that we as a country, but likes to say we are about family values, cant get there it is not surprising. I think part of the problem, it goes back to the history. Women were only allowed to work in the workforce because of world war ii. The men were going to war and they needed workers so they said all right, come in. They even provided paid leave and childcare at some moments. Then when the men came back we were pushed out again. So we have always been doing this dance of please let me work , and we have been doing it at the expense again of our families and our own Mental Health. I think we just need to call it right now for what it is, and also resist this push against the old world. Because the opportunity is the Great Resignation. 11 million open jobs. You can see these ceos faces and they are likely is, anybody, please come to work. It is a sellers market. We have an opportunity, all of us, not just women. Parents, nonbinary, all of us have the ability to dictate what we want workplaces to look like. How can women use that leverage . Often when women are under stress, they are looking for a job quickly, they are making a transition of your life, they dont always have the time to thoughtfully think through. Or sometimes they dont have the resources to think through maybe theres a better job, maybe i have leverage. And none of us are taught. Are we doing a good enough job of teaching the next generation of women how to do those things, and what if you are offering specific, concrete advice to someone in the labor market right now, looking for a job, what am i asking for . What am i pushing for . It depends on your age and everything but lets talk about lets talk about specifics. Yeah, and this is how i outlined my book, we know what the problem is, how do we fix it . I think there are two issues. Typically where we have not been any job market where there are so many open jobs in employees have leverage. Thats not going to last forever but it will last for a while. And most of the workplace organizing has often happened in labor unions. So there is not an organization that calls you up and says heres your shots. Maybe you can get them to pay for your childcare. Heres what you need to ask for. We also do need to start teaching, and working women in particular. I think millennials are getting this right. Theyre going in, asking for seven figures, pay for my therapy. They know their worth. It is not a womens issue. It is a working mothers problem. We have been so traumatized by our experience as mothers in the workplace. The motherhood penalty. In the workforce, you get paid 40 on average less than when you exited. So we are saying please let us back in, and we are breastfeeding in closets, putting networking lunches on our calendars rather than taking our kids to the doctors appointment. We are doing zumba, praying our kids arent on screen. That is what we have been too, for 100 years, but is what our grandmothers did, our mothers did and what we are doing. How do you unteach that . So much of the movement has a there. You are the leverage. What is one thing you want to change . What is one thing . Maybe you want to work from home or work remotely at the end of the school day two days a week. Maybe you want to fight for that flexibility and your employer is pushing. Maybe you want to ask about what your childcare benefits are. Part of it is figuring out, what do i need . And then saying and some people i know would rather quit than ask for what they need. The Great Resignation is being led by women. We are quitting. But then we are going to our next and quitting again because we did it did not solve it. I dont want to put it all on us because theres another piece. The things that we want, men want that, too. The amount of men i know that want to take their kids to school in the morning, they are in the job market instead of asking. It shows culturally there is a problem. We are afraid of retribution for trying to advocate for ourselves as parents. What role do you think are basically saying this is the way the United States and its culture has been all along. But what cause is that . Rugged individualism, or women were not in the workforce or striving for perfection, that feminism in america was striving for perfection . What do you think culturally . Or is it literally just the government, we dont want to use the government for our benefit unless we need to . What do you think it is . She sent an interesting thing last night. We were close to getting childcare during nixon. But then the bill failed. And when we asked nixon about that, we heard i think the place for women is at home with the children. When you listen to joe manchin, met romney, you kind of hear the same thing. I think culturally there is not the will to fix workplaces for us by men in leadership. It is the same i would argue with ceos. Im shocked because they know what is happening, they know why they are leaving. They have surveys. They are there still is resistance. It makes me think they dont actually want to make workplaces work for us because maybe they dont want us there. That is maybe at the extreme. And a little of why i came to this topic is because if you are going to be building a movement, you should know the movement that helps organize women, when i wrote my first oped, i read the comment section. And i never be the comments. What was fascinating was people on the left were like, what about the dads . And people on the right were like motherhood is a choice. People on the left still insist on wanting to talk about this issue. I think it is a mistake. I think it is not appealing to the people who are two thirds of caregivers are women. If you dont have focus, you cant move the needle. I believe that. I get called if i had called girls who code kids who code, i would not have attracted thousands of girls. Why are we pushing women out . Why does the pandemic push women out . Why was the caregiving put on women . And on the right it is about this idea that motherhood is a choice and you dont get anything from your government come your partner, your employer. It is this sense of you are in it yourself. It is your personal issue and you have to fix it. The fascinating example of this to me is school closures. I hope somebody writes about this. When that decision was made from a policy perspective, to basically because other countries, the u. K. , they do not shut the schools down. They kept them open for the reason we are about to talk about. We decided to close them and we decided to design something called zoom schooling where you needed a parent and your child at these hour increments. While, again, 80 plus percent of parents work. So most women are in the workforce. We knew in march, april, may and sure we had data, that women were the ones doing the homeschooling. So when they decided to do this crosscountry release of policy and terms of how we were going to teach millions of kids, we knew who was going to be affected by it. But we did not care. And we did not even design it in a way that would relieve the pressure that was going to be put on women to choose between unpaid labor and pay labor. And i wonder, i dont know, because im not an investigative journalist, is that product . Do they talk about that . Were reconsidered . Because we have always been the default, because if men were doing the homeschooling, no way. They would have kept the schools open. It is a fascinating question. My children are above school age at this point, but so many people at my workplace at that point were literally just going, it all went to adjust your personal resources. There was nothing available. If you were a if your husband or partner or anyone was helping you with schooling, that was great. If not, he went to the grandparents. All of these things. You talk in this book about your own experiences. There is literally a moment where you are describing falling apart and being in fetal position on the floor. Was that difficult for you to do . There is almost a trauma around those first couple of months and we did our best but my god. There are these secret conversations women have about, did your children learn anything or do they just run wild . Theres almost a guilt around the pandemic, did we do a good job or did it fail . I dont know that i have ever heard men having those conversations. But i have heard a lot of women. They learned how to play the guitar. Most of them were like thats amazing, i got to thinking rest. I started the pandemic with a girls who code super bowl ad, i had newborn babies, and all this anxiety about not spending time so i was looking forward to my leave. And connecticut got about three weeks after my child was born. I had to go back with a newborn, homeschooled and basically save girls who code from being shut down. When pandemics hit the first resource to go our women and girls. So many womens organizations shut down during the pandemic. Most of my Leadership Team or working moms. Were working moms. We were trying to save our babies, literally, our children. I got covid19 early, my liver failed, i was a mess from the health perspective. And the trauma that that decision was made without my input. It scared the hell out of me. Because so many of us have sacrificed so much to get to that point we were at. To have it taken from you and not acknowledged, two years later it has not been acknowledged. What happened to moms. It is funny. I was writing about this. Everyone this week is like oh my god, you must be so excited, your book, and i was like no, im reliving my trauma. Its about how hard it was. And i had resources. I had childcare. I can work from home. My husband works from home. When it was safe, i dropped my baby off at my parents and they could watch them for a couple of minutes while i worked. Single moms, she had to quit her job, go to another job that she could work at home so she could come so could home school, moved in with her mother, that is typical. My story is not typ