Name: How leaders handle the challenge of working from home with kids
Uploaded: 2020-09-30
Duration: 3 min 58 s
Description: Ebony Beckwith, Reshma Saujani and Avni Shah all weigh in personally.

 SPEAKER 1: I've got three young children. And as part of our MPW survey, which you heard about a little bit earlier, we found out that 47% of you in our MPW community have children under the age of 18. So I know that there's a large contingency here that's in the same camp. On top of that, we also know that this is something that is impacting employers across the board in terms of productivity and viability in all sorts of ways. And obviously it's an economic issue. It's not just an education or child care issue, right? So I want to hear from each one of you-- what has been hardest about this for you? If you want to share a story, or just something a little bit higher level. And it can be as a parent or not. It can also be just something that's personal. Ebony, can we start with you? SPEAKER 2: Sure. Well, the story that come to mind-- SPEAKER 1: This is your time. SPEAKER 2: This is what sort of comes to mind quite immediately is just right before this session, actually, I had to put my 17 week old puppy in a different room. My mom was supposed to come over to pet sit, but she wasn't able to make it due to a lot of traffic on the bridge. So while I don't have any children, I definitely just feel-- my heart goes out to the parents who have to do this on a daily basis, right? And balance the needs of the household with work. It's not easy. SPEAKER 3: When COVID happened, my son was just born. I had a baby a surrogate. And so I feel blessed that I was able to be there for his birth in Kansas and bring him back to New York City. But I was supposed to be on maternity leave. And it quickly became clear in March that this crisis wasn't going anywhere. And at Girls Who Code, we host summer programs that are inside technology companies that we found shut. We host after school clubs, 10,000 of them in schools that were closed. And we had about 200 groups on college campuses that were closed down with no end in sight. And so we as an organization, because we have a deep commitment to our girls, had to quickly think about what are going to do? Are we going to wait to see what could happen, or are we going to pivot and develop a virtual programming model so that we make sure that our girls are not left behind and all the gains that we've made over the past eight years we don't lose? And so we quickly had to develop a two week virtual program that replaced our summer immersion program, which was again, inside technology companies. And we taught 5,000 girls, half of which were under the poverty line and half of which were Black and Latinx. And we designed a program for them. Because we knew that many of our students didn't have computers at home, or accessing Wi-Fi in Burger King parking lots. And had just spent the past school year barely logging on because they didn't have high speed internet. And so we designed a synchronous [INAUDIBLE] program that spoke to our most underserved girls. And I'm proud to say that we succeeded, and we are continuing to develop and to innovate. But it's exhausting as a CEO. I have a five-year-old son, so I find myself doing laundry in between meetings. Making some fresh puree and constantly getting interrupted because Transformers on Netflix isn't working. And so it's chaotic. I'm sure Ebony is laughing because she knows me pretty well. You know, I'm a woman who plans my schedule eight months in advance, and I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow because I haven't gotten my school schedule yet from my public school. So it's challenging. It's hard. It's exhausting. But I don't think we have a choice. And so I think we're making the best out of a really tough situation. 

Ebony Beckwith, Reshma Saujani and Avni Shah all weigh in personally.

How leaders handle the challenge of working from home with kids

Ebony Beckwith, Reshma Saujani and Avni Shah all weigh in personally. 