How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani

Reshma Saujani traces her path from a bullied immigrant childhood in the working-class Midwest to Yale Law School and a hedge-fund legal career she felt trapped in by student debt. She recounts quitting to run for Congress at 33, losing twice in politics, and using those failures to build Girls Who Code into a global movement reaching hundreds of thousands of girls. She speaks candidly about years of miscarriages endured while relentlessly working, and how that toll reshaped her views on leadership and self-care. Her current mission, captured in her book Pay Up, argues that equality requires fixing workplace and government systems rather than 'fixing women.'

• On the last day of eighth grade Reshma was severely beaten up with a baseball bat and tennis racket after agreeing to a fight, an event she says made her who she is.
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• She left school with about $300,000 in debt and is still paying it off roughly 23 years later.
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• At 33, struggling with depression, she quit her hedge-fund law job after a friend and then her father simply told her to quit.
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• A New York Times reporter shadowed her congressional campaign all day then wrote a story about her shoes instead of her race.
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• She suffered more miscarriages than she can count over six to seven years while continuing to give speeches the same day she received bad news.
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• She regrets aspects of Brave Not Perfect, saying it bought into corporate feminism that fixes the woman instead of the structure.
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• After stepping down as CEO she received almost no congratulatory messages, a jarring lesson in how much recognition was tied to her title.
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• Yale Law, which rejected her three times before admitting her, later invited her to be commencement speaker.
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• Her parents fled dictator Idi Amin's Uganda in 1973 and changed their names from Mukund and Madhu to Mike and Mina to get an engineering job.
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• When she started Girls Who Code only 0.4 percent of girls were interested in coding.
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• The movement grew to roughly 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs and expanded to India and the UK.
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• A partnership with Doja Cat teaching girls to code nail designs drew 100,000 girls to the website in a single day.
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• Around 11 million women left the workforce during the pandemic.
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• In the 1980s women were near parity in technology before being pushed out of the field.
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• As a latchkey kid, she and her sister ran home and hid in a closet because their neighborhood was hostile to brown families.
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• About 51 percent of mothers report being anxious and depressed, with working women among the hardest-hit subgroups per the CDC.
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• In the U.S. most families pay more for child care than for their mortgage, yet fewer than 10 percent of companies subsidize it.
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