The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Reshma is the founder of Girls Who Code, one of the most influential non-profits in the world which has introduced millions of women to coding and the tech industry. She is also the author of Pay Up, a book about how to get women further in the workplace. Reshma was initially a prophet of the thinking that women could have it all, if only they tried twice as hard as everyone else they could achieve anything they wanted to. Now, she’s changed her mind. Trying to run an organisation with over 500 employees while looking after a young family full-time simply proved too much. Women simply have too much stacked against them having to juggle work and family life to properly pursue their careers without special consideration. What really stands out about Reshma is the fact that having built an enterprise that was on its way to changing the world, she had the humility to change her mind about major parts of her philosophy. Reshma’s story is one of how to realise and bounce back from your mistakes, no matter who you are or how far you’ve come. It takes a lot of courage to do that, but courage is something that Reshma has never had in short supply. Follow Reshma: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/reshmasaujani Twitter - https://twitter.com/reshmasaujani Reshma’s book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pay-Up-Future-Women-Different/dp/1982191570 Girls Who Code: https://girlswhocode.com Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I gotta figure out how to teach every single girl to code. That's how the world's going to be a better place. Founder of CEO of Girls Who Code. Best-selling author. Reshma Sundari. I was often bullied at school. Our house would get spray-painted, go back to your own country. And my mother just takes a look at me, and she's just crying.

And I remember thinking, I will never be silent. So I ran for Congress. The New York Times finally acknowledged my race and they sent a reporter. And we're knocking on doors. We had young girls having my poster up. She then decides to write a story about my shoes. I'm not buying into that bullshit. I wasn't going to let failure break me.

When I started Girls Who Code, 0.4% of girls were interested in coding. And then we ended up with 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs. And then we exploded in India and in the UK. And girls were interested in making the world a better place. In building Girls Who Code, tell me about the other side. You know, at the same time I was trying to build Girls Who Code, I was trying to have a baby. I had more miscarriages than I can count. Think when you are a social entrepreneur and you're building something.

The work is never done. And it's always at the sacrifice of others. For me, I got that really wrong. Really wrong. So what advice would you give to people who are probably veering towards another rock bottom in their lives? I think... So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

Reshma, as I was reading through your story, it reminded me of a quote that I read many years ago, and I saved this quote in my bookmarks and Twitter. And so I went and looked for this quote when I knew you were coming here today. And it somewhat resonated with me in terms of your story. The quote is, my parents were tasked with the job of survival, and I was self-actualization. The immigrant generational gap is real. What a luxury it is to search for purpose, meaning and fulfillment. And I know you came, at least your parents came here from Uganda. Take me back, take me back to your childhood and the context in which you were molded. Yeah. Well, my parents escaped the dictator Idi Amin in 1973. They changed their names from Mukund and Madhu to Mina and Mike. Cause I think a recruiter told

my dad that the only way he was going to get a job as an engineer, instead of he was working as a machinist in a factory was to change his name. I think about them often because I can't imagine in my twenties coming to a new country, leaving your entire family or having to leave your entire family, not having a single person that you know, not knowing the language and having to build a life for yourself. And they did it, you know, they did it with a smile. They never really complained about it. And then everything became about giving us the life that they had sacrificed so much to have. When you have parents that come from that background, as you've written about,

what they want for you as a child tends to be centered on you being able to survive in the world. And you wrote that when parents have, that might have been a quote you said, when parents have lots of resources, they care more about you following your passions. But when they're like first generation immigrants, they care about you also getting into a career where your survival is guaranteed. Yeah. What did they want for you at that age? And what did you want for yourself? You know, I think they wanted me to be, you know, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. And they wanted me to have a career where I could, you know, be upwardly mobile, right?

For them, it's always about like, okay, if we're making $40,000 a year, I want you to make 80. You know, I want you to do better than I'm doing. But so much of it, Steve, was about drawing in the lines, you know, not calling attention to yourself. You know, I was a very different child. You know, I led my first march when I was 13 years old. And, you know, I think there was a moment, I talk about this sometimes, you know, I was a very different child. You know, I led my first march when I was 13 years old. And, you know, I think there was a moment, I talk about this sometimes, you know, we grew up in this very white working class family

in the Midwest. And I was often bullied at school. And my mother was, you know, harassed for wearing a sari at the Kmart. You know, our house would get TP'd or spray painted, go back to your own country. And I remember this one day, some kids, it's literally spray painted on the side of our house, you know, go back to your own country. I remember this one day,

some kids, it's literally spray painted on the side of our house, go back to your own country. And I woke up that morning, my father was sitting with a jar of Clorox and he was just quietly cleaning the side of the house. And I think he was like humming a Bollywood tune. And I remember watching him and thinking, I will never be like him. I will never be silent. I will never not fight. And for him, you know, I think that that was the task that you had to pay to be in this country. And I think there's so many microaggressions or just obvious racism that he faced in the workplace. You know, opportunities he didn't get, the name calling, all of it. He never talked about it, never made him angry.

And I think part of that was about making sure that we had a different life. You know, I have the story that, you know, I've told before, but the last day of eighth grade, you know, it's a big celebration. There's been this girl that had been harassing me the entire time at school, calling me names. Back then they would call somebody a haji

as a derogatory term for somebody who was brown. And so she called me this name and she said, and she basically challenged me to a fight. And instead of saying no or ignoring her, I was like, all right, I'll meet you at the back of the schoolyard. And I remember right at the end of the day, the bell rings. My best friend Fu was like, just get on the bus, just get on the bus. And I'm like, no, I don't know what it was. Maybe it was because the last day of school, but I show up to that schoolyard and the entire schoolyard is just full of kids and everyone's screaming and there's spray paint and confetti.

And she just comes up to me and bang. And then her friend has a baseball bat. And I basically get beaten up badly with a tennis racket and a baseball cap. And I came to my friend who, God bless her, drags me home. And I remember walking in and my mother just takes a look at me and she's just crying.

And she's looking at my father. Why'd you bring me to this country? Why'd you bring me to this country? She says that. And they don't call the police. They don't call the school. They're just crying. And I am like, I have like a concussion.

You know, and the next day is my eighth grade graduation. And my sister reminded me, she said, you know, you woke up the next morning and you look at mom and dad and you say, I'm going to graduation. And I had this beautiful blue lace dress. And my sister called her friend over who like did my makeup. And again, we go to graduation. My father, I think, finds the parents.

The parents just say, laugh and say, kids are kids. And again, my mother cries. Why did you bring me to this country? But, you know, that was a shift in myself because I think up until that point, I was trying to be white. You know, I was mad that my parents named me Reshma instead of Rachel.

You know, I was mad that I sometimes smelled like Indian food. You know, I was mad that I couldn't go to church and know what they were talking about, that we believed, you know, in Krishna instead of Jesus. And at that moment, everything shifted. And I realized that I'm not white. I'm never gonna be accepted.

And so I better be proud of who I am and I better fight for who I am and for people like me. If I removed that experience from your history, what would I be removing from your character? Oh my God, everything, everything. I am, I think 100% of who I am from that moment. Again, I think a year later, I led my first march. I started my first organization called PRISM,

Prejudice Reduction Interested Students Movement. I got better at naming organizations the older I got, but that's when I became a warrior. You know, that's when I became a fighter. And so I'm so grateful to have had that trauma because it's made me who I am. But I will be honest, I don't think I have fully processed it.

I don't remember, I don't like relive that moment until other people who were there were like, do you remember that app? Like even my sister reminding me that I woke up the next day being like, do you know that you said that you're going to go to graduation? Like, I don't remember that. So I still do think that even though these experiences are transformative, they're painful. Right now we're going through in New York City, all of this Asian hate and all of these hate crimes that are happening against Asian Americans in New York City and across the country. And as they've been happening, I think I've been thinking about this stuff because I was like, one day I was like, oh, I can count the amount of times,

literally. And that's sad that you can count the amount of times literally. And that's sad that you can count the amount of times that something has happened to you, hateful or violent. But I think part of surviving is about sometimes blocking out these moments or rewriting what they meant to you in the future. But in the past it was painful. But in the future, it can be empowering. It can be

inspiring. Because you can tell the story and you can, you can, you know, it fundamentally changed me. I don't think I would have built the movements that I'm building right now. I don't, I don't have that. I can feel pain. I know what it's like to be not accepted, to be ostracized, to be hated. And when you got into the working world after university, you went to Yale, right? Yeah. Three times after I finally got in. Oh, really? Oh, I was obsessed. You tried to get in three times?

Yeah. Tried to get in three times. I, again, grew up in a working class community. Nobody went to Yale, Harvard. I joke that there's some like Indian auntie at the temple that talked about some kid, but I never met them. Everybody went to community school, state school. I didn't even know how I would apply.

I don't even think I ever applied to university, but I knew from a young age that I wanted to do something. And I knew that I lived in a country where credentials mattered, especially as a woman of color. And that if you had that Yale or Harvard degree, people were going to believe in you or at least open some doors. And that was always my, from the time I was 13 years old, going to Yale law school was always the thing I was chasing. So I had an argument with a guy on Twitter one day, he's actually a friend of mine.

And I've always, because I dropped out of university, went for one lecture, not for me, left. And he made the case to me, which sounds very similar to the case you've just made to me, which is as a sort of an immigrant, getting that stamp from one of the universities is one way to kind of get security around your future. And I, cause I was kind of in the camp that most university degrees are actually

a huge amount of debt, which you become like encumbered with. And then you get very little in terms of delivery versus the amount of debt and time it takes to get that degree. And that there's other ways. He made that point to me that for immigrants in fact getting a that stamp or that certificate is actually um one way that they can secure their future what was your stance on that yeah i mean i think it's a credential i don't know how much it matters now like now when i hire people i want to know about your grit your hustle like how you work um your work ethic less about where i don't even think i know where half the people who work for me went to school, nor do I pay attention to it. Any of them. But I think when I was growing up, it did matter. But I will say that being in those kinds of institutions, I often would just sit in my chair and watch.

Watched at how people with power navigate. And I think that that then taught me a lot. And I would say it's on the boards that I sit on today. You know, a lot of it is just watching how people operate and how people navigate. You know, going to Yale Law School, I say this, I never could raise my hand because all these kids had gone to these fancy private schools

and I don't know what they were talking about. And I felt like I didn't belong. And so that's the bad part of it, right? Because you feel like you kind of snuck in and you're not able to fully step into your power and articulate and be who you want to be. But I think it was a really powerful experience for me in grit. Because again, I kept applying, I kept applying, I kept applying, I kept applying, I kept applying. And I finally transferred to Yale Law School and got in and got that degree. Now, do I think I would still be the same person if I didn't have a degree from Yale and a master's

degree from Harvard? Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it wasn't those things that made me who I am today. You leave with $300,000 in debt. A lot of debt. That is ridiculous. Yeah, I blame my father. In the UK, we don't get that much debt. We get 50K if you do badly, but that's probably the top end.

But $300,000 in debt when you join the working world, that forces your hand a little bit when you join the working world, right? In terms of the jobs that you can take, because you need to pay that off. Totally forced my hand. Yeah, because I would have liked when I graduated to go be a civil rights lawyer. But instead, I get an offer from a fancy law firm where I'm making, you know, a couple thousand bucks a month. And I didn't do the math on the interest payments, or how long it would actually take for me to pay off this debt, because that was just principle and not interest.

And now, basically 23 years later, I'm still paying it off. But I think that we're... That's why I think so many people who actually want to make a difference because they have student loan debt aren't able to, and then wait and wait and wait. And you see all these good ideas kind of die on the vine because now you're stuck working for the man and you literally feel stuck and you don't know how to get out. How did you feel? Oh, I was miserable. I mean, because that wasn't the plan. You know, the plan when I graduated law school was, you know, to run for office and I would just go take this law firm job. And after a couple of years,

I would quit and go do the thing. But then I got stuck because I, now I was helping my parents with, you know, some of their finances. I was living, I had this apartment that I had to pay rent for. And I was then living a life that, you know, saddled me to that desk. And I was

getting older. And then 10 years passed by. And I don't know about you, but for me, I rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And what I mean by that is I have to be at my bottom of anxiety, depression, despair, and then I make a change. And I really did find myself, you know, at age 33, like every night, barely being able to get out of bed, you know, and having a large glass of wine and just crying. Why? Because I was like, is this my life?

I, you know, they say in Hinduism, like you have a dharma, like what you're put on this earth to do. And I feel so blessed that from the time I was a little girl, I knew have a dharma, like what you're put on this earth to do. And I feel so blessed that from the time I was a little girl, I knew what my dharma was. I remember just laying on the grass, looking at the clouds and just imagining this life of being a change maker, of making a difference in the world. And here I was 2008, the world is falling apart and I'm sitting in a fricking hedge fund as a lawyer.

Like what? I'm so far away from that little girl who's staring at the clouds. And I didn't know how to get out from this life that I felt very stuck by because I wasn't rich. I didn't have all this money in the bank account. And I did have, also, I think the expectations

of my immigrant parents, because I was doing what the good Indian girl was supposed to be doing. I was a lawyer in a law firm and nobody I knew had the path that I wanted to take. So I didn't even know how to get there. And I didn't know who to ask. I didn't know who was gonna give me the playbook.

And so I was lost. And I remember I had one of my best friends, Deepa, happened to call me at this moment, and she just said, just quit, and there was nothing like profound, but there was something about, I think, hearing those words at the right time in my life that was like, yeah, I can just quit, and I can, and I did. And the second call I made was to my father. And I remember him saying, Bitta, yes, quit. And then I was like, whoa, like, cause I had built him up as the reason that I was not chasing my dreams. And by getting that permission, I realized, oh, I was the one. It was my fear.

You know, my fear of like making, taking a risk that was actually standing in the way of me actually doing what I was meant to do. So then I didn't have any more excuses. And I ran for Congress. Isn't it amazing that we, most of us, especially I think kids of first generation immigrants, end up trying to live out our parents' dreams. And then the other thing is this kind of miscalculation of risk I continue to hear about, and that I kind of faced in my own life, that we believe the risk is not fulfilling the external expectation. Whereas it's so evidently clear from every person that I've sat here with that the actual risk,

if you just zoom out, ends up being not following the dreams of that girl staring up at the stars. That actually is the risk. In fact, the courageous thing to do, the most risky thing to do is to stay in the law firm because you're risking the most important thing

of all, your happiness. Yep. And if you can like reframe that and understand that, like I say this sometimes to, when I meet young people in jobs, I go, you're risking the most important thing of all your happiness. And if you can like reframe that and understand that, like I say this sometimes to when I meet young people in jobs, I go, you're the risk takers. I'm not, I'm the coward. I couldn't take the risk you guys are taking. And I think if you just reframe it, which is clearly what your life has proven to be, it's proven that the biggest risk was actually staying. It can be a really liberating force. And off you go, you run for Congress, which is a

tremendous thing to do. Yeah. Crazy thing to do. I was 33. I was the first South Asian American, Indian American woman to run for Congress in the United States. I had no idea what I was doing. Like I said, like I didn't have, I couldn't be like, Hey dad, you know, will you build me a campaign strategy? Or, and I had to kind of figure it out on my own. And also like people, I mean, I ran against this very powerful, very vindictive woman who, you know, was not someone who was going to take lightly

to this young Brown girl running against her for her seat. Did she criticize you? Oh my God, still. Still? Yeah, she hasn't really gotten over it still. But in some ways though, it's good because it wasn't an easy thing to do. Meaning it'd be much easier if the seat was open

or if the other person was like, this is great. You know, we have competition in the race. But I really, it was such a beautiful experience because I was so damn naive. Like I really thought that I could shake every hand, meet every voter and I would win. But it was the best experience of my life because it's how I learned how to be an entrepreneur. Because when you run a campaign, it's like starting a business and shutting it down in the span of 10 months. You got to hire people,

you know, you got to raise money. You got to figure out what your message is, what your brand is. It's exactly what taught me. That experience is what taught me to build Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms. And what gave me probably the confidence to do it. You had to walk into rooms. I mean, I had to walk into rooms of like, you know, 65 year old seniors who couldn't even pronounce my name, who would ask me what my religion was, right? It was wild. And I'd never gone on television before. My first TV interview was Chris Matthews, which was the largest news time show. He was so mean to me. I didn't even know where to look in the screen. It was a mess. I didn't know how to dress. I had never given a, like a speech in front of people before. I remember I would literally practice my speech and memorize it and pace my little apartment. And so everything

was just scary, but amazing. It was the best, still probably the best 10 months of my life. When you make that decision to run for public office and that person starts criticizing you, probably quite personally, probably quite based on character, that's the best way to, I think, discredit a political opponent. How does that actually feel in the moment?

Because especially reflecting on your childhood. Yeah, it was devastating because I was, well, you know, first a lot of, you know, incredible feminists like Geraldine Ferraro were like trying to get me as Gloria Steinem was like, why are you running? Like, these are women who I admired. Because again, I think when you, and I thought I would go to these, you know, campaign events and people would say, well, young people need to run. Young women, you should run for office one day. And I naively thought, well, look, I'm running. Like, aren't, isn't there, you know, isn't there, aren't I doing what you, we've been

talking about what the movement needs, but really what they meant is like, run, but don't run against me and don't run against one of us. And, and also I think the second part of my story was very inspirational being the daughter of immigrants, you know, coming from a working class background. So they really had to shift my narrative. And she did a really good job because I came from Wall Street. You know, I wasn't running Wall Street. I was, you know, a lawyer, a junior lawyer at Wall Street. But so that narrative shift happened.

And because I had never known how to control my own narrative, I lost that battle. And I often found myself on the defensive and people are mean. And I would make the mistake of reading the comment section. And it was really, really tough, really tough. And I never got to be the person that I was. I remember this one time we finally got the New York Times to do a story on our race. And I had now, I was this brown girl,

I had raised more money than any Democratic challenger. I was actually the only Democratic, I was the first Democrat challenger in many ways in the history. Now it's very common. Alexandria Ocasio, my friend, right? It's very common. Back then it was like never done. So I was like this upstart that was making waves in many ways, I think helped open the path up for people like Alex to actually say, yeah, we got to fight the establishment. But I remember the last week, the New York Times finally acknowledged my race and they sent a reporter and she followed me around the whole day and we're knocking on doors and immigrant communities are walking into like, you know, communities in Queens where you had young Bangladeshi girls having my poster up being like, I want to be like her one day. And how revolutionary it was, especially for the community

to see someone who looks like them running for office. And I remember she then decides to write a story about my shoes. Not a word about my campaign, but about my shoes. And it was, again, such an example of what we do to young women, young people of color when they run. You know, we make it a caricature. We don't take them seriously. And then people don't take them seriously. I lose like spectacularly.

And I was shocked that I lost. I had not even written my concession speech. We had booked this hotel room in New York City that we could not afford. And my campaign organizers had posted the entire room with all these notes. I can't wait to be in Washington. This is the bill we're going to pass. This is the change we're going to make. I had literally, because what happens when you're running for office, you go to these New York City subway stops and you hand out your campaign. And everyone was like, I voted for you. I voted for you. So I was like, I got this in the bag, you know,

like, oof, it's going to be, you know, an upset. And then I'm sitting there, my father's, you know, kind of sitting with me and we're watching the election returns come in. And like, you know, five minutes in, it's done. My dad's like, I'm going to bed. I'm like, thanks, dad. And I wanted to cry so bad. I was devastated.

And, you know, I had no contingency plan and I had literally picked a fight with some very powerful people. And I remember there's this young woman who every morning was like with me. You know, she was like my, you know, basically my body person as they call it. She's just looking at me, Rebecca. And I was like, I'm not gonna cry because I know she's gonna remember this moment for the rest of her life and I need to show strength. And so I stood up there in my victory party.

Everybody's crying. The entire place is crying. I'm standing there and I'm just like, I'm gonna do it again. Don't you worry. And then I came back to my hotel room and then I'm just like, you know, I'm going to do it again. Don't you worry. And then I came back to my hotel room and then I cried and cried for like a month. And how did you pick yourself up from there

and rise from the ashes once again to found Girls Who Code and sort of, I guess, Karen carrying on with your life? Drinking a lot of margaritas. No, but seriously, I think I've read a lot about competitive athletes and for a lot of them, what makes them great is they had something that happened

in their career early on. They didn't get picked in the first draft. You know, they missed that one shot. And it puts kind of a chip on their shoulder, like, I'm going to show you. And that's what this race did for me. It was like, I didn't get picked in the first draft, but I knew what my potential was. And I was going to show you. And I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to let failure break me. Take some time to get to that place, right? The dust has got to settle, the tears have got to be cried. And then it took me a month, but I also have a hack on failure that has worked for

me, which is I let myself ruminate about it. You know, then talk to my boyfriend, now my husband, I'm like, why did that happen? What mistake did I make? My father sent me a nice long email about the 10 things I did wrong. Really? Savage. Brutal. Listen, Indian parents, you know what I mean?

And then I was done. And I said, and I was ready to move on and started thinking about what I was gonna build next, the campaign maybe that I would run for next. So the first, I think for me, the first, that was my first really big failure. And I think sometimes the first one is easier because I kind of could tell myself, well, I did make some mistakes. If I did that differently, if I hired that person, if I didn't say that, then maybe I would have won. So my first campaign loss was easier than my second one.

You also understand the system the second time around, right? So like the first time you're actually learning the system you're playing with. And you said it yourself, you didn't realize that people would be doing these character assassinations. And same with my first business. I didn't understand the system in which you build a business and hiring and all these things. So yeah, you can reflect on it and say, oh, naivety. Right. Right. Right. But then what happens next?

So for me next, I said, well, I'm not going back to that private sector job that I hated. I'm going to have to deal with being broke. And what are all, and I loved, I loved meeting people on the campaign trail. I love talking to them. I loved hearing about their problems. And I, I'm still that 13 year old girl who wants to make a difference in the world, still the Dharma warrior. And I was like, okay, well, what of all the things I saw on the campaign trail, the Dharma warrior. And I was like, okay, well, of all the things I saw on the campaign trail, what moved me? And when I ran for office, it was in 2010. So it was when tech was starting to boom. Twitter was just coming up, Facebook, Instagram. And I would go into computer science classrooms and robotics labs,

and I would just see lines and lines and lines of boys trying to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. And because I wasn't a coder or computer scientist, I was like, where are the girls? Where are the people of color? And I kept thinking about those classrooms. And so then I spent the next year, basically on my lunch breaks and in my evenings, just learning everything about

why there weren't girls and women in coding and started kind of writing a business plan that became Girls Who Code and started plotting my next run. So I basically ended up running for public advocate of New York City, which is kind of like the second position to mayor and then launching Girls Who Code at the same time.

That's a lot to have on one's plate. It was. Would you recommend that? Well, the way it played out, I would recommend it because it all ended up working out good for Girls Who Code because the public advocate race was about, I'm going to make sure that every kid in New York City learns how to code. I lose that race. This time I realized, wow, politics is just, I like to say it's not a performance sport. It's not a meritocracy. It's not like the person with the best ideas wins.

And now I've run, you know, one, I've taught 20 girls to code. And so now I'm like, all right, if you're not going to elect me, I'm still going to teach every girl to code. I'm going to teach every girl in America to code and then the world. And then I really have a chip on my shoulder

because now I didn't get picked for the first draft. I didn't get picked for the second draft either. And you use those skills, right? So you've learned a bunch of skills along the way, and this is one of the blessings of failure. You get to learn all of these wonderful skills about the nature of the world and people and fundraising. And I'm guessing in many ways that failure had been a blessing because without those two draft misses, you wouldn't have all these amazing skills you have now, right? Totally. I think the biggest skill that I learned in campaigning is how do you tell a story? How do you inspire people? How do you connect to people? And by my second campaign,

I don't have the written out speech in my pocket. I don't have the suit on. I got my hoops and my red lipstick and I am communicating and I'm there and I'm present and I have nothing to prove. And I fight back when people do the character assassination. I'm not easily convinced when people say that they're going to support me, that they're going to really support me. Like I can see people now. And so I lose that race, but you're right. I learned so much and I become more comfortable in my skin and who I am. And Girls Who Code, really phenomenal thing. I read that you've reached over almost half a million girls, right? Is that half a million girls that have learned to code? Yes. That is crazy.

That we've actually gone through our coding programs and then we've reached about a half a billion through our work, our books, our videos, our campaigns. We've reached a lot of kids, a lot of people. Tell me about this organization. How does it look? How does it function? How is it distributed all over the world?

I read that there's 1,500 girls who code clubs around the world as well. Yeah, well, there was 10,000. So, yeah, and in the UK. There's 10,000? 10,000 girls who code. Well, so it started like, basically the model was, when I started Girls Who Code,

0.4% of girls were interested in coding. And girls were interested in making the world a better place. But when they thought about a computer scientist, they thought about some guys sitting in the basement somewhere drinking a Red Bull and they're like, yeah, no, thank you. And we just culturally had done such a good job of pushing girls and people of color out of technology. You know, we had Barbie dolls that said, I hate math, let's go shopping instead. Every image that you saw on television, you know, from weird science to revenge of the nerds was just, again, these like really nerdy white dudes. And so it didn't feel very inclusive.

And so at Girls Who Code, you know, what I wanted to do is one, meet girls where they were at and two, change the culture. And so what I mean by meet girls where they're at and to change the culture. And so what I mean by meet girls where they're at, I started thinking, well, if girls went to technology companies like a Facebook or a Spotify, and they walked in and they saw what was happening, they actually learned to code embedded in a classroom inside a tech company. And that the project while they were there was to build something about a change that they wanted to make, again, connecting it to what girls wanted to do, then I can then inspire a generation of young women to want to be coders and technologists. And so we started kind of one tech company at a time and we would build these summer camps and, you know, years, you know, basically, you know,

in a handful of years, we're running kind of the largest summer camp in America. And then we started expanding that. And then part of, as an organizer, I wasn't really, I wasn't building a nonprofit. I was building a movement. And what I would say to my students, I would say, okay. And the experience for them was transformative. I mean, it was just,

you saw these girls just explode in terms of like what they wanted to do. The sisterhood that they built in every classroom was basically, you know, white, Asian, black, trans, non-binary. I mean, just, and so many girls had never met, you know, girls who were white and never met someone who was black before, never been friends with somebody who was trans. So like you were basically creating quite frankly what the world should look like in terms of love and empathy and sisterhood. And so I would say, you know, during the graduation, I have one ask from you. I want you to go back to your community and I want you to go back to your school and I want you to start a club and I want you to find one girl that's gonna join. And so they like met me on my challenge. And so then one girl and then a hundred girls. And then we ended up with 10,000 girls who code clubs across the country

in every single county, town and parish. And then we exploded in India and in the UK and same model, right? Where you had basically girls going back to their communities, volunteers, librarians, teachers, people saying, I wanna start this, I wanna help you build this move, but I wanna start this club.

And so we just had this massive explosion. And then culturally, we started slowly, slowly, slowly changing the narrative and making coding cool. Last year, we did a partnership with Doja Cat, started slowly, slowly, slowly changing the narrative and making coding cool. You know, last year we did a partnership with Doja Cat, you know, where we basically coded her nails. Literally in one day, Steven, a hundred thousand girls signed onto the website to basically learn how to code nails. And now 10 years later, you know, you turn on Netflix and you watch any teen drama, which I love to watch. You know, the protagonist is always a cool girl coder. And so we've made coding cool. We've built the pipeline of talent.

You talked about the hardships you encountered on the campaign trail, character assassinations, the anxiety of it, dealing with failure. Business is riddled with the same inevitable hardships. So tell me, in building Girls Who Code, tell me about the other side, which is the, the difficult parts. Well, I mean, one, I didn't know what I was doing, you know, and like, I'd never built a large scale organization like that. And so, you know, I, I had one of the good things was that I had a board that believed in me. Always build your first board as family and friends because everybody then is wanting you to succeed. And so they really protected me. Like I am, I'm intense. And, and, and if you're going to come work for me, you know, it's going to be intense.

Define intense. I, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm better now, but I'm going to ask your employees. Yeah, I'm better now, but I got big vision and I want to get it done. And I work all the time and I don't stop. And it's, it's, I'm always pushing. And I believe in many ways, I'm an evangelist and I believe in, so it is, it'm always pushing. And I believe in many ways, I'm an evangelist. And I believe in, so it is my gospel. Girls Who Quote was my life, my gospel, my religion.

And so I think if you're gonna come work for me, it's your religion too. I heard you're the passion filter. Girls Who Quote. I do have a passion filter. Yeah. Yeah. But then when you become a thousand people,

you know, you or, you know, a hundred, you know, like you, it's hard. You're not going to get everybody who's going to have that same passion and that same intensity. Do you struggle with that? When people don't seem to- When they don't believe?

Well, no, when they don't behave in the way that you would have behaved in that situation or when they don't seem to have the same passion and, you know, that you have. Yeah, I don't believe in jobs. But for some people it's a job. have the same passion and, you know, but you, you have. Yeah. I don't believe in jobs, but for some people it's a job. But I don't believe in, I don't believe in jobs. So when, so that, that I've, you know, what do they say? You have the triangle, right? You have, you have A people, every organization has top A people and then B and then C's and then D's,

but you need to have a couple of C's, maybe not D's, right? And so, and also, I was just telling you about my father that sent me the 10 page email or, you know, about all the things I did wrong. I wasn't good at great job. Thank you for doing that. Because I was in, this was church, this was religion, you know? And so I got, I got better at these things. You know, one of the things I was always good at though was hiring people who were smarter than me. I never had an ego about like, I want to be the one. And so I had really amazing people from the beginning who, as they say, knew how to speak Reshma.

Did you get the praise criticism balance wrong? I definitely got the praise criticism balance wrong. Same. I definitely got it. I still have it on now. I still, I have to, I get, I'm better now because I just send flowers. So it's like, you know what?

Because I don't need it. And maybe I tell myself I don't need it. People don't say to me on a daily basis, good job, great work. But you get it, right? Because you get it everywhere you go. Every time they, I mean, you're on CNBC earlier on, right? The way they introduce you is, you know,

this is what I'm just thinking, I'm answering this for myself because I was interrogating that from my perspective. No one ever says well done to us in terms of our team, right? Really? Like in the same way, there's no, but we get, I get it.

If I open my DMs on Instagram, I get, oh my God. You know. You do. I do too. But you know what's funny? I'm gonna tell you this. I stepped off as CEO a year ago

because I also never believed that anyone should do anything for too long. And I had built the organization. I had the money in the bank. I had a vision. I had an amazing woman that I wanted to take the reins from me. And the day we make the announcement, my chief of staff, Gloria, is like, okay, I'm going to block off two to four because you're going to get inundated with so many messages congratulating you, thanking you

for your service. And I was like, okay, yes, I'm ready for it. You know, Tariqa and I make the announcement, nothing. And she emails me, Tariqa emails me, you know, at five being like, oh my God, you must be over. I'm so overwhelmed with all the messages that I've gotten congratulating me for being the new CEO of Girls With Code. You must also, and I didn't want to make her feel that she's such a wonderful person. I was like, yeah, nothing. And I realized at that moment, because I wasn't the head bitch in charge anymore, right? I wasn't the CEO anymore. And so it was a wonderful, the lesson a little bit bit too about how much of that is coming from who you are and how much of that is really this,

in case you don't know until you die. So this big organization, Girls Who Code, all around the world doing incredibly well, what would you have done differently? I would, so I think what I got really wrong was the personal, you know, at the same time I was trying to build Girls Who Code, I was trying to have a baby and I had more miscarriages than I can count. And I got into this habit at Girls Who Code, you know, very, again, so, you know, I launched Girls Who Code, I'm launching my campaign, I had my first miscarriage. And I think when you have your

first miscarriage, you think, oh, is this a fluke? And then I had a series of them. But I would literally, you know, then I'm heads down building Girls Who Code. And again, I think when you are a social entrepreneur and you're building something, the work is never done. And it's always at the sacrifice of others. And you always are giving, giving, giving, giving. And I got into this habit where, I'd have to go to the doctor's office, my husband and I for the 11, 12 week check-in and I'd have something planned in the evening,

introducing President Obama, speaking to a thousand girls, doing a fundraising dinner. And the doctor at three o'clock would say, I'm sorry, Mr. Johnny, you know, we don't hear a heartbeat. And instead of saying, hey guys, I can't show up. I'd say, okay. I cry. My husband would be like, Rashma, go home. And I'd be like, I got to show up at this thing. And I'd show up. And I did that for seven years, six years, seven years, where it just, and I would remember, I would stand there in front of the crowd and be like, something's wrong with

me. The fact that I can do this. And I would be oftentimes standing in front of a thousand little girls, the little girl that I desperately wanted. And so it wasn't until, you know, I think when it became too much of the way that I was leading and living. And, you know, by the time after I had my first and the second, my second child, the same pattern started becoming. I remember this one time I was in San Francisco and I had to go fly to Utah and same thing. Doctor calls and says, your levels don't look good. You're gonna miscarry soon. And I got on that plane to Utah and I had to sit down with the governor of Utah.

And again, another thousand girls. And then I just broke down. And I remember I assembled my team and I said, I can't do this anymore. I'm taking a couple months off or a month off. I need you to run this organization. This is what is happening in my life and has been happening. Every picture, every TED Talk, when I look at me standing with President Obama or the TED picture, every TED talk, every, every, and when I look at me standing with President Obama or the TED talk, I think about the tragedy or the baby that was quite frankly dying inside of me. And so for me, I got that really wrong, really wrong.

And I don't want people, and part of what I'm grateful for is people didn't know because, you know, I'm also in the responsibility of a lot of young women who work for me. And I don't want them to think that that's the price that you have to pay. What advice would you give people to avoid them hitting? Because you've hit a rock bottom moment multiple times in your life through like unsustainable behavior, right? Yeah. That's how I see it. So what advice would you give to people

who are probably veering towards another rock bottom in their lives because they're not listening to themselves, I guess? Well, I mean, I think the thing is, is that I think many of us live in this, like up and then crash, right? And that's what we think is the way that you're supposed to live.

And I think you need to live always healthy, meaning like you have to put your personal mental health and your personal health first. And so don't wait for rock bottom to hit, see the signs early on and take those breaks, take that time off, you know, take a nap, whatever, whatever it is that you need to do. Don't live in that same way anymore. But it's hard because again, the entire girl boss culture, the entire kind of lean in culture, the entire, you know, CEO culture is about living that way. It's almost

like a badge of honor. Hey, I had, you know, no heartbeat and I went and gave a speech. Like that's almost like what we think we're supposed to do to lead. That's strength. And I think we have to completely revise what that means and what it means to be a leader. And it means, you know, empathy. I too, you know, was leading Girls Who Code during the pandemic and had to lay off a bunch of people. And until that point, I had never cried in front of my team and I would just cry and cry. And then I would get mad at myself for about crying. But then I'd be like, no, no, no, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to cry. You're supposed to show vulnerability. You're supposed to say, hey guys, I just got some incredibly horrible news. I'm not coming to work.

But that's often seen as a sign of weakness and we have to make that a sign of strength. I'm guessing your book, Brave Not Perfect, was written in this period of your life. Oh yes. Right? Yeah. Because there's many things you regret about that book. Yeah. Because I think that book was also about corporate feminism,

about fixing the woman and not fixing the structure. And look, I acknowledge that in the book that, you know, but what I used to say is, you know, while we're fixing the institutions, let's figure out how we can fix ourselves, you know, i.e., you know, unlearning perfectionism and orientating yourself towards bravery. But I really believe that, Stephen. You know, I really bought into that, that we could get to equality, you know, that it was really about the power pose, you know, and the color coding of your calendar and the delegating more and the not crying in the bathroom and all the things that you were supposed to do to be a leader.

And I think that's what women have been told. And so we were never looking at, well, what's wrong with the structure? Why in, for example, going back to my experience I was telling you about fertility, why do we do performance reviews and not wellness reviews? Why are you not supposed to be sad at work? Why are you not

supposed to cry? Where did these values show up and how do we get them out? Written on the back of your new book, which takes a very different approach on many narratives, Rochelle Simmons says, finally, we have a book that aims to fix the system, not the women. And I think when I was reading about why you wrote this book, Pay Up the Future of Women and Work,

I read that you wrote it from a place of, on one hand, anger, but also hope for change. Yeah. Why anger? Well, listen, I mean, I, I, as a mom, you know, found myself 2020, uh, you know, started the year with Girls Who Code having a Superbowl ad. I was going to teach more girls than I ever had before. I was having my second baby finally, you know, via surrogate. And so I was really looking forward to when Cy was born, just spending that time with him and just hugging him and kissing him and staring at him because I had missed carrying

him in the womb. And then a few weeks later, the pandemic hit and I found myself having to take care of my newborn, homeschool my six-year-old and save my nonprofit Girls Who Code from being shut down. Because when pandemics hit, the first resources to go are to women and girls. You know, my whole leadership team were mostly working women. And what we were saying to each other on the Zoom chat was just hold on, hold on.

Because when September comes and the schools open, everything will be fine. And I remember that when that September came and I got that letter from our department of education, my son goes to public school in New York city. They announced this thing called, you know, hybrid learning where you got to log on your kid at nine o'clock, 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock all the while maintaining your full-time job. I thought two things came to my mind. The first one, which was incredibly naive, like,

aren't they going to ask me? Because, you know, which was incredibly naive, like, aren't they gonna ask me? Because, you know, in the United States, we have these time and use surveys. And so we knew in the early months of the pandemic, who was doing the homeschooling? It was women. And so we knew that if we made a policy like closing down the schools,

that it was invariably going to force millions of women to leave the workforce because they couldn't supplement their paid labor. They were going to have to supplement their paid labor for unpaid labor. And so the fact that someone that I don't even know could make a decision that could affect my life on a dime terrified me. And then the second thing was you started seeing, again, over the course of the pandemic, 11 million women leave the workforce.

And I knew from building Girls Who Code because Girls Who Code, I was trying to solve the gender gap in technology. But what people forget is that we didn't always have a gender gap in technology. That in the 1980s, we were pretty much almost at parity and then we pushed women out. And so similarly here, you can't have women be 51% of the labor force and then become,

you know, in the forties, again, percent of the labor force and have all those women leave in nine months and think that it's an on and off switch. So I remember like, well, where's the plan? Like, is the president going to get on and announce the plan that we're going to have to make sure that we don't devastate decades of feminism? And so there was no plan. And that's what really inspired me to start this I wrote an op-ed. I often, Stephen, when I get angry, write and then just post things, post articles. And I made the mistake, or actually it was the best thing that ever happened

is I read the comment section. And my op-ed was that we need a Marshall Plan for moms. And when I read the comment section, people on the left were like, well, what about the dads? And I was like, even though, again, men had not been pushed out of the labor force because this was from a data perspective, solely affecting women.

And then people on the right, well, motherhood's a choice. So you don't get to have affordable childcare or paid leave or any structural support because you chose to be a mom. And it was the first time I was like, wow, motherhood is controversial. And I kind of had that same sense that I had when I started Girls Who Code, like this is a problem that needs solving. Again, especially for women like our mothers. You know, my mom, when I was a kid, I was a latchkey kid from the time I was seven. And my parents couldn't afford the $50 a week for childcare.

And so from the time my sister and I were seven and 10, she would pick me up from middle school and we would go home. Now, remember I told you that we lived in this neighborhood that didn't really want any Brown families there. So we wouldn't walk home, we would run home. And then we would open up the door and close it and we would hide in the closet because we were terrified. And I think about how my mother felt every day at 345, knowing that her babies were running home because they couldn't afford

childcare and the unconscionable choices that mothers, mothers of color have to make every single day because we don't make it possible for them to be mothers and have a job. And so that is when I was just like, all of this girl boss, equalities expressed into court office, it's just all about you was like, equality is expressed into the corner office, it's just all about you,

was like, that's a lie. And I've been selling this lie for the past 10 years. And if we're really gonna get to equality, we have to fix the systems. There's a really staggering stat in chapter four of your book that says that women are now spending more time on childcare than they did in,

I think it was 1980. Yep. Which is pretty staggering because I thought one would think based on all the noise that I've heard about equality and what are these things that women would be spending less time on childcare than 1980.

Yeah. It's because we're in this moment of intensive parenting. Think about our, my parents didn't even know where I applied to college. They didn't know what I was doing at homework. It was just we're in this moment of intensive parenting. Think about our, my parents didn't even know where I applied to college. They didn't know what I was doing at homework. It was just like, go raise yourself. Right now, you know, we're taking our kids to Spanish, Hindi, and, you know, and, you know, Chinese, you're learning three languages, going to piano class, you know,

basketball class. We're constantly on top of our kids because that is the societal expectation that we have to intensively parent our children at the expense of our own mental health. And we also have to be completely on as workers. We're in this hustle culture where you're constantly driving, driving, driving, you know, at work. And so if you're a working woman, you have these two huge expectations

that you basically have to meet and it's exhausting. And it's why we have a mental health crisis. You know, 51% of mothers say that they're anxious and depressed. You know, the CDC released a study saying that the subgroup that is suffering the most anxiety and depression are working women. You're seeing this in the UK. It's an alcoholism, Adderall addiction. It is on the rise, rising suicide rates of mothers. Mothers don't break, but they're broken right now. And young people feel like they can easily talk

about their mental health and how they're feeling. But it's not against, you don't hear mothers talk about their mental health and how they're feeling. But it's not against, you don't hear mothers talk about that. We're not supposed to. We're supposed to be martyrs essentially, or have it all together. And so there's no outlet for us. I say in my book, when working women make a list, it's like their kids, their partner, their pet, and then themselves. We are last on the list. We do no self-care. And society doesn't expect that we should be doing that.

It's seen as being a bad mom or being selfish when we spend time on ourselves. How is your mental health? I would say that I am a six right now. I mean, I'm exhausted. I'm not gonna lie. I think I have two little kids, now two and seven. The pandemic has been crushing.

My seven-year-old eats his clothes because he's anxious. My two-year-old eats his clothes because he's anxious you know my two-year-old you know can't talk yet you know he's got asthma you know he gets sick all the time because now the masks have come out and now his son doesn't you know his brother doesn't have one so he's getting sick so so you know our kids have really been traumatized because of the pandemic. And now we're traumatized. And so I do think that like, and I think a lot of the women in my life, I think we just need a beat. Like I wish they would announce

like a national vacation for like a month. Maybe that's the answer to the question I was compelled to ask next. But how would you get yourself, if you were to give yourself advice, if I just told you what you told me, I was the six, what advice would you give me to get to a 10?

I would say, take a break, you know, or do things for yourself. And listen, I think I'm much better at that. So I got, one of the best things I got for myself was a whoop. Yeah. So I'm like obsessed about my sleep. And to the extent that I will go to bed at 8 a.m.

or leave a dinner early, because I know that if I'm getting eight hours of sleep, I am my best version. I try to play tennis three times a week. I love tennis. I'm horrible at it, but I love it. You know, I try to have fun. I went to a Justin Bieber concert last weekend.

You know, I do date night fun. I went to a Justin Bieber concert last weekend. You know, I do date night. I got girls trips planned. I make more time for myself. I don't get on, you know, basically for 10 years as I was building Girls Who Code, I would probably do two to three flights a week and then trying to take the red eyes to be home for my babies.

And I don't do that anymore. You know, I say no. I realize that like, it's not that this opportunity is gonna go away. I didn't realize that before. You know what I mean? I was like, I gotta do this. I gotta show up here.

I gotta, but no, it's like, maybe I won't get this chance again, but oh well. And it's really liberating. And so I think the only reason why I'm a sixth grade friend is I'm in the middle of a book tour. And so I've definitely been orientating more towards old Reshma of like, you know,

three, four talks a day, getting on planes, doing the thing, not sleeping as much, eating too many chocolate chip cookies. Like, but I think my habits and have been much more healthier than they've ever been. I'm also really practicing not wanting things. I think growing up as an immigrant, I needed credentials. I needed those degrees.

I needed that validation. I needed those degrees. I needed that validation. I needed those accolades. And I was always chasing the next big thing. And it's funny, as I sit here, there's nothing I want. There's no title I want. There's no award I want. There's no recognition I want. And when I start catching myself wanting things, I pull back. You know, I told you I was just, I applied to Yale Law School three times before I got in.

And I got a call last November from the president of Yale saying, we would be honored if you'd be our commencement speaker. Now, Stephen, like the commencement speakers are normally like Hillary, Barack, you know what I mean? I've watched them. I've watched them. Steve Jobs did, I think, Harvard, I'm not sure, but yeah. And I was like, me?

And I was like, the real one? The real one. The real one? And then of course my friends were like, the real one? My husband's like, the real one? I was like, yes, the real one. But it was so amazing. One, getting that because that I had been chasing them for so long

and finally they asked me. But two, it was exactly, I wasn't chasing it. A few questions there. In terms of getting, putting up those boundaries and getting good at saying no, is there now like a, I think as we age,

we develop a prism in which our decisions filter through, which allows us to decide whether this is serving us or not. Like when you're younger, you just say yes to everything. So some guy with, I don't know,

radio station no one's listening to wants to interview you. Oh my God, someone wants to interview. Yes, I will fly. Tell me where, I'll be there. Exactly. Yeah. Right. But then as you realize the importance of time and that every decision you're saying yes to comes at the expense of something else. Is that, what is your prism now where you find yourself in your career when you're deciding what to say yes or no to? So two things. I think one, impact. Yeah. And two, I love, listen, I love people who are starting up

and who I know that if I go on their podcast or if I have them interview me, I will be the most famous guest that they have and it will help them. I like to be that person. And sometimes my team

will be like, you don't have time to do something. No, no, no. These are the ones that are actually the most important to me. And because someone did that for me and that's how I'm sitting here with you today.

And then I think the other, I, again, I think going back, I've been studying the Bhagavad Gita, which has again been a gift I gave myself this year because it's been something I've been wanting to do for a long time. What does it mean? The Githas basically are kind of religious book

in Hinduism, but it's really a book about spirituality and about how do you stay really focused on what you're meant to do in this earth and not get distracted by all the shiny things. And that's really important to me as I kind of enter this final, the stage of my life of I, again, staying very focused on what I'm on this earth to do and not getting distracted by all the shiny things.

And one of the things that Gita says is like, it doesn't make sense that humans want things because all you're doing is inviting yourself for disappointment. Right? If you didn't want anything, you don't get it, it doesn't matter because you never wanted it. And so, you know, that has been a really big gift for me in really staying focused because if I'm put on this earth to be a warrior and my job right now is to fight for mothers, to get them respected and dignified and to change workplaces, you know,

so that they work for women and that this is the once opportunity to make that structural change, then everything I'm saying yes to is about furthering that, my service for the people. In your book, you talk about that change and you kind of list four sort of key principles for bringing about that change. Empower, educate, revise, and advocate. Tell me about empower. What did you mean when you wrote that in your book? Yeah. So look, I mean, empower is really about,

like women are always told like, you should just meditate more, do yoga. And if you do that, you'll feel really good. And so I didn't want to take those kind of dated, you know, again, fix a woman stuff, but really what are some like non-negotiables? And so one of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of creating tangible boundaries. And so like in my house, you know, my husband does the nights and I do the mornings. And if I'm sitting around watching Netflix at six, he'll be like, hey, can you change a diaper? Can you warm up with a bottle? So at six o'clock, I just bounce. I go for dinner by myself. You know, I go out with my friends. But I'm just, my point is I'm gone. And so I've created that boundary so that I don't get roped into doing more of that unpaid labor than I need to. And so I think that the need to create boundaries for all of us is

really critical. The second piece is really about how are we shifting employers? I am literally, just like I was with Girls With, I am on a mission to get companies to start subsidizing childcare in the United States and then in the world. In the US, childcare is like the largest expense for families. Most families pay more for childcare than they pay for their mortgage.

And right now, less than 10% of companies subsidize childcare. We often think of childcare as your personal problem, but childcare is an economic issue. And so I am, you know, building this national business coalition to get companies to start paying for people's childcare. They pay for people's egg freezing and IVF. They should be paying when you take care, you know what I mean, when you have a child. And so how are we shifting again, this idea of, you know, what employers should be doing? You know, it was Women's History Month last month.

And so many of the conversations we were having, you know, probably, you know, again, across the country, across the world is about, you know, you should get a mentor. You should get a sponsor. All of the programming that we do around women's empowerment is about fixing women. It needs to be about fixing workplaces. You know, why don't companies offer childcare? Why don't companies mandate paid leave for men? So that when you're, again,

doing childbearing from the beginning, you get the ratio right. You get the equation right. Why are we still fighting flexibility in remote working? Why are we still trying to demand that men and women commute two hours and not see their children or their pets or their elderly parents? You know, why are we resisting again, you know, what we've learned from the pandemic and forcing ourselves back to the old normal? And how do we push against this, you know, and again, shift corporate policies. The third thing I talk about in this book is about,

you know, how do you revise the culture? You know, again, it's so normal for women, for example, you know, to hide their motherhood. I remember when I became a mom and my team was like, great, like you should be a mom blogger. I'm like, no, anything but a mom. You know, moms are seen as like, you know, again, you know, when you become a mother, you're seen as like, you don't no longer care about your career. It's like where you go to die. And I think we have to start shifting that and we have to start parenting out loud. You know, you shouldn't be hiding your kids from your workplace. You shouldn't be apologizing when your kids interrupt your Zoom call. You shouldn't be apologizing when your kids interrupt your Zoom call. You shouldn't be waiting to the last possible second

to say that you're pregnant because you're worried that your employer is gonna discriminate against you. You know, we have to really start parenting out loud and being honest about that. You know, you go on Instagram and you see pictures of mothers and their kids and they're all beautiful

and they're wearing matching outfits. That's not what vacations look like. You know, my vacation, everyone's fighting with each other and we're screaming, tell the truth about what it looks like. You know, and that's how we begin to shift, I think, the cultural image of motherhood. And we shift from being martyrs, you know, to being respected and to being valued. But like, you know, again, I think motherhood needs a refresh across the world. And then finally, it's really about advocating for change. You know, we just went through, you know, in the US, you know, we just went through the president

kind of proposing policies and nothing got changed. We didn't get, you know, United States is one of the only nations that doesn't have paid leave. You know, we don't have affordable childcare. In the UK, you have a parental income. We don't have those things, you know? And so we need to really make structural change that comes from the government to really make lasting change. And we, you know, as working women have to learn how we fight for ourselves. You know, we have so many movements that are about protecting our kids, you know, mothers against drunk driving, mothers who are

marching against, you know, gun reform, mothers that are trying to protect the climate, but there isn't a movement of mothers fighting for moms. You know, I tell people all the time, you can't change the lives of girls unless you change the future of women. As you look forward at your mission and your future and what you hope to achieve in the next chapter of your life, what is that tangibly? If I had to measure success, if I was to say that all the things you write about, the change you write about in this book, if I was to measure it and say it was successful, what would the world look like?

That we have true equality. You know, that little girls can be everything and anything, honestly. You know, that they can be president or prime minister, that they can launch a company, you know, and get seed funding, that they can launch a company and get seed funding, that they can be a scientist, that they can literally, or they can be a stay-at-home mom, that they can be whoever and whatever that they want. And I think my hope for mothers is that they too don't see their biggest dreams die on the vine, that they don't live a life of regret and envy and should have been, would have been,

because they let things happen to them rather than change things. That we live in a world where we respect and we dignify women and girls. We're not there yet. We're so far from being there in many ways. And I think part of it, again, is because of the things that we've sold women, that we've basically told women that the problem is you. Think about all the books that women read, Confidence Code. I gotta learn how to do a power pose. I gotta lean in. All of it is about women thinking that you're wrong. The amount of times that women come to me and say, I have imposter syndrome. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. They didn't let you in. You're in there because you are the best. But now you're made to feel like you snuck through the back door. And so what I am saying in many ways is really radical.

And it's very deeply seated in us. And it's not just, it's women, it's people of color, it's poor people, anybody who is not, you know, who has really, you know, had to, had to through grit, perseverance, you know, found themselves in rooms that people don't look like them. We're still asking ourselves, do I belong here? Should I be here? And we're constantly being fed information, book, podcast, movies that tell ourselves that we just have to change one more thing about ourselves, that we have to fix one more thing. And, you know, it's just simply not true. I always say that I feel so lucky that, you know, through the work that I've done, I've been able to be in almost every single powerful room. I've probably met every single powerful person in the world. And I used to be that girl at Yale Law School in my constitutional law class

going like this. And a few years ago, I got asked to give a speech at Bill Gates' summit. And the slot that they had given me was between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. And it was the only speech that anyone was giving. It was a summit of Fortune 100 CEOs. You can imagine who was in the room. And I remember them saying, you know, this is a really hard speaking slot, Rashma, because most people are really intimidated because Bill and Warren are sitting in the front row and it can be a little scary. And I remember as I was sitting there in the backstage, they had given me 10 minutes to speak. I remember thinking, man, I wish they gave me 12

because I really had some more stuff to say. And then I remember thinking, how did I become this woman when I used to be that girl? And I remember thinking, yeah, it's because I've been in every single powerful room. I've met every single CEO, every president, every prime minister. And when I meet them, I'm like, you? You're running what? Me and my girls, we can run circles around you. And I realized that it's never been about whether we're qualified, whether we're prepared, whether we're ready, that we've really never really dissected all of the undeserved, unearned privilege that so many people have. And that we have literally bought and been fed, you know, basically this propaganda that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough,

that we don't belong. And the real resistance in this moment is saying no more. I'm not reading those books. I'm not taking those courses. I'm not taking that class. I'm not buying into that bullshit. I'm here and I can lead too. That's a very powerful place to end. However, we do have a closing tradition. Okay. Where the previous guest writes a question for the next guest.

Oh my gosh, okay. And I don't get to see, you don't get to find out who it is and I don't get to read it until I open this book find out who it is and I don't get to read it until I open this book. Jack is the only person that gets to read it. When was the last time a day flew by and what were you doing? You know, one of those days.

I don't know if I've had a day, but I've definitely had a couple hours. And I think the last time was, I actually got to visit my son's school for the very first time in the pandemic. And my son is a little Gandhi. He is like the kindest little soul. And just being able to watch him and him show me his things and just seeing him interact and the joy and like the confidence and the kindness.

And I could have sat there all day. And it felt like, again, a minute because I think I was so happy. Does he understand your work? He does. He does understand. I mean, he does understand. He gets mad at me sometimes.

Why are you always fighting for girls and moms? What about the boys? But- You're grounded good, you mean. You know, it's funny. I would bring him everywhere, you know, from being on The Daily Show or giving a commencement speech.

And so he's seen Mama lead and speak. And he knows that I'm helping people. And I think it's in many ways, I think it has, he always said that he wants to be a kindness engineer, that he wants to, you know, be an engineer to help people. And maybe he gets, hopefully,

I'm gonna take credit for that a little bit because I think he sees that, you know, in the work that I do. But yeah, he's an old soul. Thank you. I have to say, you know, it's really a tremendous thing and it's really inspiring the thought that you've managed to get almost half a million girls into coding. It really, really inspires me on a deep level because I've been thinking about work that I want to do in my life. And so reading through your story was a real source of inspiration, specifically around, I've been thinking a lot about about because I'm an investor on the show called Dragon's Den in the UK been thinking a lot about how young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds don't know how to invest their money don't know about taxes

and all those kinds of things and seeing the model of girls who code and how you've managed to reach so many people on a topic that is liberating if people can understand it in the same way that understanding money is liberating if you can truly understand it has been is a blueprint for me and that's why I was so excited to meet you and your book is really fantastic thank you one of those books that leaves you with a real sense of mission and inspiration and really makes you take stock of your life and and the future of the industry we we all reside in in the working world it's also made me consider a lot of changes that I need to make in my own companies. Even this conversation we've had today, because I, as a male CEO, and male CEOs are the dominant force at the top of organizations, they are the most abundant creature in organizations,

especially in the Fortune 500, white male CEOs in particular, can't understand a lot of these things because they haven't had the lived experience. And even when they say they understand, a lot of the time it's either virtue signaling to protect the bottom line or something else. And having forces like you in the world that are able to articulate this systemic challenge in such an articulate way is more necessary now than ever before. So thank you for being. So thank you for being you and thank you for writing a book that I feel everybody needs to read, Pay Up the Future of Women and Work. Thank you.