Carol Juel, Chief Technology and Operating Officer, Synchrony 
Reshma Saujani, Founder, Girls Who Code; Founder and CEO, The Marshall Plan for Moms; Author, Pay Up
Moderator: Ruth Umoh, FORTUNE

Most Powerful Women 2022 - Finishing the Fight For Women’s Equality

Carol Juel, Chief Technology and Operating Officer, Synchrony 
Reshma Saujani, Founder, Girls Who Code; Founder and CEO, The Marshall Plan for Moms

Finishing the Fight For Women’s Equality

we are a room full of smart, powerful driven women and it's likely we've all we've all experienced professional challenges specific to us as women. Uh the pandemic brought the reality of workplace inequities for women to like like never before, especially when it comes to working moms. So many were forced to choose between their jobs and their roles as primary caregivers at home. Our next two guests are vocal advocates for women in the workplace and are dedicated to advancing equitable workplaces through a number of initiatives and actions. Carol Jewel is chief technology and operating officer at Synchrony and johnny is founder of Girls who code founder and ceo of the marshall plan for moms, author of Pay up and we're grateful to have her as M. P. W. Summit guest co chair this year. They they joined fortunes ruth uh um oh for a conversation on the future of the working world for women, please welcome all three to the stage. Good afternoon everyone. The final day we made it to the end. Let's jump right in the last few years have shown us that many workplaces are not working for american moms and they are voting with their feet leaving the workforce syndromes and we've seen the labor force participation. I want to do a quick pulse check with the audience, raise your hand if you know someone or you yourself have either left a job or left the workforce entirely due to caregiving responsibilities, raise your hand. That's a that's a good number of people, which is pretty telling. So that brings us to the conversation at hand today. One of the unique challenges that you all are seeing as it relates to women's workforce participation carol. Perhaps you can take this one off. Sure, thank you. I think um throughout this conference we've heard the statistics, you know, there's still one million women not in the workforce that were there before the pandemic began. And I think one of the key components of that is child care. Child care is a business issue and child care is something that we need to address to get those women back into the workforce. And in order to do that, you need to think of it as a business priority. It needs to be something that's front and center of your executive team and you need to find innovative ways to do that. And let me just share a little bit at synchrony as many companies through the pandemic. We did a lot of listening, you know, you're listening to your employees, you were understanding what's happening, you were trying to develop solutions that work for them and you need to apply innovative principles, just like any other business problem. You know when you're building products or you're building technology in synchrony, we use an agile process, we are constantly listening, adapting, developing a minimum viable product. You need to do the same thing for employees solutions, partnering with your HR teams, getting the support of your Ceo as we did and some of the things we did. We tested and we learned and they didn't always work, but they were impactful to our employees because they met the needs that they were having. One of the things that we did was really taking the friction out of child care. We have emergency childcare benefit that nobody was using, it was too hard during the pandemic, all the childcare centers were closed. So what did we do? We took the friction out of the process, just like you would take the friction out of the business process. You could actually as an employee take and use your benefits with anybody in your bubble. We heard that moms wanted safety. There were only a few people that were in their home so they could use that emergency backup child care to support their needs for their Children and hire someone that they were comfortable with and that is a benefit we've kept in place and it is 60 days a year and up to this point in 2022, we've already seen over 4000 days of emergency backup chair and what that does is that employees the opportunity to be productive that gives them an opportunity to do their job and not worry about their Children question, a similar question for you because you argue that we need to redefine the workplace completely overhaul current systems and create new ones that work for women. How do we do that? Where do we begin? Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to begin by supporting moms in the workplace and kind of redefining what we've been telling people, you know, for the past 30 years of what it takes to, you know, be sitting in this in this conference room, you know, I think for far too long we've been telling women to, you know, lean in real hard and girl bust your way at the top and if you color code, your calendar, you two can come to the most powerful women's conference. And that is simply just not the truth. And I know for me, I learned that in the pandemic, the hard way I found myself running girls in code, you know, one of the largest women and girls nonprofits in the world. I had just had a newborn baby, I was virtually homeschooling my kindergartner and trying to save my nonprofit and it nearly broke me and I learned the hard way that you know, having it all is just a euphemism for doing it all and for far too long, we've been trying to fix women. I. E just do a power pose, be a little more ambitious, leaning a little harder instead of trying to fix the structure. And so you know, now is our opportunity to like I said, you know, finish this fight for equality once and for all by fixing the structure. So what does that mean? I think, you know, carol and I are are incredible partners on, you know, the first thing is child care as as, as carol mentioned, you know, the second thing is, you know, making childcare affordable. The largest cost center for families is childcare. People pay more for their child care than they pay for their mortgage. It's the number one reason why 11 million women left the workforce because childcare was unavailable and unaffordable. The second thing is we have to have gender neutral paid leave policies. You know, uh 90% of women basically go back to work 10 days after having a baby, you're still an adult diaper and you're going back to work every single one of us raise your hand if you went back to work too soon after having a child and we never recovered from that. You know, The third thing is is, you know, the motherhood penalty. You know, we talk a lot about the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is not a gender pay gap is a motherhood gap. The reason why we have a pay gap is because we pay mom's less and we pay dad's more. 58 cents on every dollar. And so that to me is like an algorithm solution that my girls who code console for you right in a minute, like so to me it's about focusing on these three structural um change corporate policy changes that we have to make and I think when we do that, we'll start to move towards equality, focusing on the system itself. Uh we hear that women are burnt out that they want increased work life balance. A phrase that I personally hate. I think it's far too amorphous. I I prefer work life integration. What does that look like though in terms of concrete policies? So I think It is for the workplace has changed forever through the pandemic and we firmly believe that it's not going back and flexibility is key, flexibility and choice. We surveyed our employees again, we did a lot of listening, 85% of our employees asked for flexibility and 93% of our caregivers say flexibility is critically important to them doing their jobs. And so we have leaned in and allowed employees to decide what they want to do. How often they might want to come into the office or never come into the office and then really being very specific around. When do we get together? When do we gather, What are the purposeful ways that teams need to connect and how do we balance? The need for business needs flexibility. And as my ceo says it's the grand experiment but it is working, it is working in our retention rates Are well above industry average and we have seen in the last year a 30% increase in our applicant pool in our business. So flexibility is a currency, it is in my view it is table stakes for businesses to understand to support their employees and then figure out how their company needs to involve evolve in order to deliver on that promise. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. We know that like even as we're having this conversation around hybrid work is that women need flexibility. You know, I think about myself, you know, it took me 10 years before I had my babies. You know, had so many fertility challenges. But when I had them, I saw them for an hour a day. And you know what so many women need essentially is the permission to kind of create their own schedule. And I think we're having this conversation around remote work acting as if it's a black or white issue and that we can't just redesign workplaces to make them finally work for women. I mean, think about it everything about workplaces, Why are we, why do we work 9 to 5 and school days are 8 30 to 3. You know, why is it so damn cold in those offices? Right. Like everything about the way workplaces have been built, they've been built without us. And I mean, we've talked about this. I think you always build towards the most vulnerable. That's how I built girls who code and went to refugee camps and underserved communities. And if I can teach a girl without wifi without a device, I can teach anybody if we built workplaces for single moms, single women of color. Remember black women, 90% of black women are the single caregiver and the single, you know um income, the person who's bringing in the income in the house. So we should be making workplaces work for her and when they work for her they will work for everybody. But instead we're basically building workplaces for the most privileged just to add on to them. You know, the majority of our our workforce is women and hourly workers and so understanding what the current challenges have created for that demographic and helping to build the policies. And then I think the key component to what Russia is saying is we as business leaders need to connect and share those, a big shout out to everyone in this room. If you do not know what the national Business Coalition for Child Care is, please log on to the marshall plan for moms page, learn it, understand and figure out how you can bring it back to your office, how you can bring it back to your leadership team to engage in the conversation of what we need to do to support the women in the workforce. What's interesting about the both of you, we have a mult founder, we have a Chief tech officer, neither of you are in talent or people operations related roles and you both argue that we need to look at this as through the same lens as we look at other business solutions and business Operations walk us through that framework and I mean absolutely, I mean carol see carol and increase funded the national Business Coalition for Child care because childcare is an economic issue, not a personal problems. Right? And so I think we both see this, you know, from a talent perspective and from a business perspective and that we have to start creating models where we're talking this is an economic issue, not a personal issue for far too long. Child care, like your personal problem that you have to go solve. But the number one reason why we know that we're seeing women leave the workforce, 50% of women in tech leave by the time the 35 when they're 35 to become a mom. So it's so clear, right that if we can actually solve for child care, you know, we can basically solve, you know for for the talent issues that we're facing in terms of women leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers. And that is a bit business imperative. And I think again, going back to the National Business Coalition for Child Care, I mean the government is not fixing this problem. We've seen this in terms of them not passing build back better. And so who is left to basically solve that? It's the corporate sector. It's the private sector. I mean, and again with girls who code, I mean we've taught 500,000 girls who code reached half a billion people, I raised $100 million from the private sector. The private sector help me teach more girls than any other school district and it's the same thing that we're doing here with child care. We in this room are going to solve the childcare crisis in America. We are the private sector is because it matters to us in terms of our talent, our business in the bottom line, the retention aspect of it is key. I mean it is not, it is not lost on any leadership leader in my organization that this is, it is a business crisis. If we are not addressing this, we will have problems attracting and retaining talent and that ultimately goes to the bottom line. So this is a business priority. You can offer all of these programs and all of these offerings for women but you can't force them to make use of it. I mean for instance I'm thinking of you know lactation rooms and women fearful to walk in there and and breast so how do you get them to actually take advantage of it? I think the key is I mentioned earlier, I know it sounds overstated, listening like what however you do that in your company. Is it round tables is a full service. It's really important. I'll give you an example. One of the things we leaned into was well being so we sponsored on our staff well being coaches for, through the pandemic and continuing and we will into the future. But we listened and we said, oh my gosh, wait a minute. We didn't hit the mark on that because our employees were telling us those well being coaches didn't actually didn't feel like connected with them because we did not have a diverse set of well being coaches. So that was an active listening session to say, how is this working again? That idea of an agile process, a minimum viable product, get your employee feedback, iterate the process and make it better. And I'm telling you when you listen to your employees and you act on it, that is a magical thing because they say, wait a minute, they're actually listening to what I'm saying. They're responding to my need in that network effect is what will get people to adopt these programs because that one thing and we're almost out of time. But I also think it's about culture change. We have to stop hiding our motherhood. Look most of us when we became mom. So please don't tell anybody right, because we knew that it was going to shift how much we made, whether we were taken seriously how we're seeing. And so we are at a moment where I know carol and I the first thing when you ask, well, what do you do? I'm a mom before I am the ceo of anything before I'm the leader of anything. We have to lean in to our motherhood, respected value and dignified the reason why we're the only industrialized nation that doesn't have paid leave. The reason why we don't have affordable child care is because we still live in a culture where we're told to hide our motherhood and we have to change that. Absolutely. I do. We're out of time, but I do want to underscore the fact that women want to work. They want to return to the workforce, they just don't want to return to the workplace structure that they left. And so we have to make them worth returning to thank you both for such an insightful conversation.