How companies can support women with childcare initiatives
In this excerpt from Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani’s latest book, the author discusses how moms really felt doing double duty early in the pandemic.
“Before the pandemic, I used to go into a panic whenever I woke up to an email from my kids’ school saying they were closed for a snow day,” said Marianna, a mother of three kids under the age of nine. “I’d get such a pit in my stomach knowing that my entire workday would be lost and that my boss who has no kids and likes to call mine ‘rug rats’ would definitely not understand. I laugh about that now because 2020 was like the longest snow day from hell.” If the pandemic showed us anything, it’s that the availability of childcare dictates women’s ability to work and, in the longer term, to stay in the workforce at all. When care centers and schools closed, forcing millions of women to leave the workforce because they relied on those resources or employed caregivers who in turn relied on these resources for their own children it became crystal clear that access to childcare is a key component to the future of work. Bottom line: Without affordable, reliable, quality childcare, we cannot work. Our livelihood literally depends on this.