Reshma Saujani

Courtesy of Moms First

For more than a decade, Reshma Saujani has been one of the leading voices challenging the systems shaping women’s lives—from closing the gender gap in technology through Girls Who Code to advocating for paid leave and affordable childcare through Moms First. Through her bestselling books, political activism and movement-building work, she has consistently pushed conversations around ambition, caregiving, work and power into the national spotlight.

Now, with her recently released documentary No Country for Mothers, Saujani is taking on what she describes as a deeper structural and cultural crisis surrounding motherhood in America. The film—produced by Moms First alongside Culture House Media, French Tuck Media and Bobbie—explores how American mothers have been failed by economic policies, workplace structures, political agendas and cultural narratives that were never designed to support caregiving or family life.

Blending investigative storytelling, historical analysis and firsthand stories from mothers across the country, the documentary examines everything from postwar gender expectations and the “girlboss” era to the rise of “tradwife” culture, online division and the growing economic pressures pricing many families out of parenthood altogether. It’s a call to move past manufactured divides and build an American motherhood that actually works, with the childcare, paid leave and real support moms have been promised and denied for decades. At its core, the film underscores the reality that many of the struggles mothers face are not personal failures, but systemic ones.

No Country for Mothers premiered in New York City on June 15 and now begins a national screening tour with stops in Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco and more. As the film was intentionally designed to build a broader movement and unite people around these issues, it has not been released for individual viewing; instead, thousands of mothers, caregivers and advocates have signed on to support the film, share their stories and host screenings in their communities nationwide to create space for honest conversation and collective action.

In our wide-ranging conversation below, Saujani speaks candidly about the myths women have been sold around “having it all,” the motherhood penalty in the workplace, the dangers of algorithm-driven division, the need for collective action, and why she believes motherhood could become one of the most unifying issues in America today.

Marianne Schnall: You’ve spent your career building movements—from Girls Who Code to Moms First. What made you feel that this moment required a documentary? And what do you hope people will take away from it?

Reshma Saujani: I think motherhood in America is broken by design. We’ve been getting conned since the ink dried on the Constitution. And oftentimes we think that these structural problems are our personal failures. Like the fact that the school day ends at 3:00 and work ends at 6:00; it's like I'm set up to fail before I've even had my first cup of coffee. So I wanted to do a documentary that really exposed the lies and really shows women how we are being intentionally divided and distracted from making the structural changes, like getting childcare and passing paid leave, that would actually fix American motherhood once and for all.

Schnall: Why do you think motherhood has become such a cultural battleground? And what myths or misconceptions are you most hoping to dismantle through this documentary?

Saujani: That’s the thing we discover in the documentary: it's always been a battleground. Because the worst thing you can call a mom is a “bad mom,” right? And we've had so many different depictions of what a “bad mom” is—she's a wine mom, she's a stay-at-home mom, she's a working mom, she's a mom who doesn't vaccinate, she's a mom who breastfeeds. We constantly throw these divisions that are often in the binary. So we create two camps, one that does and one that doesn't. And we fight each other.

And if we're so distracted by our own divisions that we’re not looking at the problems that are being created that are making motherhood so hard, we're not organized to fight against those structural failures because we're too busy judging each other. We're too busy commenting in the comment section on Instagram rather than marching for paid leave. So that’s historically what has prevented us from passing these big structural changes that would support us and fix this once and for all.

Schnall: I've heard you say that people are being “priced out of parenthood.” What is the current landscape for parents right now?

Saujani: Many people are choosing not to have children. The birth rate is the lowest it's been since it's been recorded, the replacement rate's at like 1.6. And part of that is because we've priced people out of parenthood. Fifty-five percent of Americans can't afford the essentials, like diapers, shoes, groceries. And the vast majority of them are also being priced out of childcare with 50 percent of Americans in debt because of the cost of childcare.

That's a huge economic problem for our country. It's like what I say to young people all the time: “Don't let them take your choice away from you.” It's an injustice to young people to pretty much price them out of parenthood, to not allow them to have children not because they don't want to, but because they can't afford to. I do believe ultimately we're taking choice away. These are financial decisions.

Schnall: You say in the documentary, “We are trying to fix women rather than fix the system” and that “we never really fought for the ability to choose to move in and out of the workforce without penalty.” What are those penalties and how can we begin to build a system that is better for mothers?

Saujani: If you look at history, I believe that motherhood was the unfinished business of feminism. Feminists were fighting for our right to vote, for our right to be in the workplace in the first place. So the work that's left to us now is to figure out the fact that most American women have to work and they have kids. Eighty percent of women will have a child, so we're constantly balancing our families and working. And because workplaces were never built for mothers, we fail at it. And then we think that those failures are our personal failures, when in fact they’re structural.

So for me, the first part of really fixing this is getting us to understand we are not broken. We are not the problem. Society structure and policy culture have never been built to make us be able to even succeed. Once we start recognizing that these divisions and distractions have been there since the beginning of time, we always say “same con, different costume,” like tradwife and girlboss—that’s not new. These false divisions have been going on forever. And again, they're a distraction.

The problem is, we fall for it every single time, and that prevents us from mobilizing in creating the biggest of possible tents to actually get these policy wins that would fundamentally change our life if we pass universal childcare in this country. If women did not have to essentially drop out of the workforce or downshift their hours or struggle to basically choose. I meet women every day that are sometimes having to decide, “Am I going to work at Walmart or at this factory? And since my childcare is either not available or my babysitter didn't show up today, am I going to lose my job or am I going to leave my child unattended?” Women are having to make those choices every single day. When you remove that obstacle, when you remove that anxiety and stress, when you make it possible for women and families to do what they need to do to provide for and take care of their children, the people that they love the most, everything changes.

Schnall: What would a country designed for mothers look like?

Saujani: Well, America is the only industrial nation that doesn’t have paid leave, so the first thing would be paid leave. Give families the time to be with their children once they have them, to raise them, to heal, to have their logistics set up. I have friends who visit me from other countries, and we’ll be walking down the West Side Highway here in New York, and they'll see three-month-old babies being strolled down the street by someone who's not their mother. And for us, that's so normal, but it's not normal that we think that's just what you have to do. So many women go back to work two weeks after having a baby. We need to create and design a society where that is not happening.

Secondly, it's about affordable, available childcare. Workers can't work without childcare, and businesses don't work without workers—our economy cannot function. Childcare is the linchpin of affordability, and childcare as it stands in America is a broken business model: parents can't afford to pay more, and childcare workers can't afford to make less. So someone—whether it's the government or the private sector or, quite frankly, both—has to come in and provide that extra income to childcare workers in order to make the system work.

Schnall: You also talk a lot about these unrealistic pressures on women and mothers. Were women sold a version of “having it all” that was never structurally possible?

Saujani: Absolutely. All you have to do is follow the data. The vast majority of high school valedictorians are girls. The vast majority of those getting their bachelor's degrees are women. The vast majority of those getting their PhDs in some fields are women. What happens is, when we become mothers, because of the motherhood penalty, because we don't have workplace flexibility, because we don't have paid leave in childcare, women face a penalty when they return. And that is what leads to the gender gap in pay, whereas men get a 6% increase for every child that they have—it's not a penalty, it's seen as an asset, a strength, a reason to give you a bonus. We treat mothers and fathers very differently in this country because we immediately assume that the minute you become a mom that you are less interested, less available, less motivated, and we penalize you for it. And we've never actually rectified that wrong.

Schnall: Talking about the wider implications, I remember when I was doing interviews for my book What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? that point came up so much: that part of the reason why we don't have more women in leadership, or perhaps we haven't had a woman president yet, is because we don't have these policies in place for working mothers. It's actually keeping women from advancing in leadership.

Saujani: Absolutely. We keep talking about this like it's a binary, but it's not about working or staying at home, or a tradwife or a girlboss. Most women want freedom and choice. They want something in the middle. They want to be able to pursue their dreams or pursue their degrees and be able to provide for their families and they want to be able to spend time with their children.

And it's interesting: as an entrepreneur who's built two organizations where most of my employees are mothers, I get so frustrated when people make it seem like we actually can't design things for moms and also succeed, that success is dependent upon a model built for men. It frustrates me because I've done this twice as a founder and CEO. I've built two innovative organizations that have solved real problems that could go toe to toe with any brand in the country. And I did it with dignity and grace and flexibility for the women and men who work for me.

What we talk a lot about at Moms First is, what’s the behavioral change that you have to encourage in order to end the culture wars? Because if we ended the culture wars, if all of us said, “You know what, I'm not participating in these false divisions,” that in actuality, we all know that we all want the same things. I talk to women who voted for Trump and MAGA moms and progressives, and they all want universal childcare; they all want paid leave. We need leaders, especially business leaders, offering that and showing that those models exist.

Schnall: Something you said recently on Meet the Press really stood out to me: “We spend billions on bombs and pennies on moms.” Why has caregiving remained so politically undervalued? And what does the country's treatment of mothers reveal about its values?

Saujani: I think it just shows that we don’t value this work and we don't value moms. Why is America the wealthiest nation that puts the least amount of resources into these two structural things that we know would change everything for mothers? It's because we've treated America's moms as our social safety net, like, “If they're going to do it anyway, and they're going to do it for free, why do I need to put money into that?”

To me, nations are judged on how they treat their elderly and their children. And right now, if we're putting billions of dollars into bombs and pennies into children and moms, then that's a report card on the morality of our nation. And women in many ways are the whistleblowers, they are our moral compass. They do stand up and tell you what is right and what is wrong. So we need them in the rooms, we need them sitting around the table, we need them teaching our children. We need them building our companies. We need them leading. We need to be listening to their ideas. We need to be reading their books. It is up to all of us to make sure that women are not written out of our history.

I think what changes that is a mother’s movement that is big, that is broad, that is unabashed. When we decide we've had enough, it will change.

Schnall: For the documentary, you went around the country speaking to so many different types of moms—working moms, stay-at-home moms, moms on the Left, moms on the Right, single moms. What most struck you about those conversations? And how can we turn this into a unifying issue?

Saujani: One is that we all want the same things. We show this in the film as we’re in a focus group with more conservative moms, and you recognize that we’re not fighting over policy. We all have the same obstacles. There is a common experience of being an American mother that is unifying. It's the thing that brings people together. And I think that's why there's so much opportunity there.

The second thing I kept hearing over and over again as I went around the country was the sense of judgment. Every mom I met felt that she was getting judged. Judged because she stopped breastfeeding or because she decided not to vaccinate her child or because she wanted to stay at home. And it was that sense of judgment that created a lot of isolation and lack of community and lack of trust. So if we could really stop judging one another and our choices, I think that’s how we get unified. It’s harder in this day of social media: we're baited in every single day because we spend so much time scrolling, so it's like 24/7 essentially being stimulated into taking the bait. But we have all the power: just don't take the bait. Don't click on it.

Everything would be different if we came together. You and I are more likely to die with less rights than we were born with. That would not happen if we were united. The biggest opportunity that we have in the women’s movement and in the feminist space right now is to figure out how we come together, how we start fighting with each other, how we stop dividing, how we stop judging. Once we do that, we're unstoppable on every issue.

We have more power than we fully realize. When women come together, we do big things. So I just want us to focus on how we can inspire more of that.

Watch the No Country for Mothers trailer.

For more information about No Country for Mothers or to attend or host a screening, visit MomsFirst.us. For more about Reshma Saujani, visit ReshmaSaujani.com.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.