A Marshall Plan for Moms

RESHMA SAUJANI IS ANGRY, TIRED AND DETERmined—angry at the damage the pandemic has done to women, tired from the past year’s struggles to balance work and family life and determined not to let those challenges interrupt her mission to close the gender gap in tech. She’s especially determined that other women not be forced from their life’s work either, setting back the progress that’s been made over the past 30 years.

The founder and CEO of the nonprofit Girls Who Code, who is also mother to two children under the age of six, has spent the past year engaged in the same epic juggling act as millions of other moms across the U.S.: trying to work a full-time job while managing remote learning for a child while trying to cook a meal everyone will eat while helping her elderly parents while doing a hundred other work and family tasks. Despite her exhaustion, Saujani knows she’s one of the fortunate ones, with more resources and a better support system than most. That’s made her all the more determined to do something about the desperation so many other working mothers feel, especially the lower-income moms and women of color who have taken the hardest hit from the COVID crisis.

Enter the Marshall Plan for Moms.

The proposal, named after the signature post-World War II program that saw the U.S. provide more than $12 billion in economic assistance to rebuild Western Europe, is designed to help working mothers rebuild their lives and careers after the havoc wrought by the pandemic. That’s included a rapid exodus of women