America is facing a crisis on two fronts: maternal and child health and child care. And as you might imagine, women bear the brunt of it. “Our country is the place where the most people spend the least money on child care,” Reshma Saujani, founder of Moms First and Girls Who Code, said Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, California. It’s a wealthy country,” he said.
“The mothers are broken,” Saujani said.
Saujani said it was the pandemic that made her realize that many women were struggling with the weight of being working mothers. And it’s not just labor, it’s also the penalty of motherhood.
We don’t have a gender pay gap, we have a motherhood pay gap, Saujani added. In that vein, the United States is one of the few countries where maternal mortality rates are actually rising, said Christy Turlington Burns, who sat next to Saujani on stage.
Saujani pointed out that men’s salaries increase with each birth of a child, but women’s incomes decrease. Burns said a woman dies every two minutes from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. These alarming statistics form the basis for the intertwining of economic, health, and perhaps even greater crises.
“For decades we have been told that we are the problem and that it is our fault that we are not free and equal,” Saujani said. “That’s because we don’t have enough confidence. Because we didn’t have leaders. Because we didn’t have a color-coded calendar. We’re the problem. Well, that’s a bold lie.”
This mistaken belief has prevented women from achieving equality in the workplace. “Motherhood is the final battle for gender equality,” Saujani said. She then described this as a market failure that required intervention, whether from the private sector or the government.
Well, we happen to be in an election year where the concept of motherhood has been brought to the forefront, sometimes through debates over abortion and child care costs. Saujani said that when she asked former President Donald Trump about the latter, Trump responded with a “salad of words.” Still, the debate over child care has since spread rapidly, sparking further discussion during the presidential and vice presidential debates. Not to mention, men may be more careful because they’re worried about their daughters and their struggles to maintain balance in the future.
And the Roe v. Wade reversal is expected to increase maternal mortality rates, especially for Black women, Burns said. She has spent time with mothers who have had to travel to different states to deal with abnormal pregnancies, sometimes seeing anti-abortion posters and signs along the way. Health care workers who are unable to treat patients will also be affected. Burns said she was inspired to get involved in this work and advocacy after bleeding after giving birth to her now 21-year-old daughter.
“This is like cutting off the hands of doctors across this country,” Burns said.
