Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think)

by Reshma Saujani

Overview

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The founder of Girls Who Code and bestselling author of Brave, Not Perfect confronts the “big lie” of corporate feminism and presents a bold plan to address the burnout and inequity harming America’s working women today.

We told women that to break glass ceilings and succeed in their careers, all they needed to do is dream big, raise their hands, and lean in. But data tells a different story. Historic numbers of women left their jobs in 2021, resulting in their lowest workforce participation since 1988. Women’s unemployment rose to nearly fifteen percent, and globally women lost over $800 billion in wages. Fifty-one percent of women say that their mental health has declined, while anxiety and depression rates have skyrocketed.

In this urgent and rousing call to arms, Reshma Saujani dismantles the myth of “having it all” and lifts the burden we place on individual women to be primary caregivers, and to work around a system built for and by men. The time has come, she argues, for innovative corporate leadership, government intervention, and sweeping culture shift; it’s time to Pay Up.

Through powerful data and personal narrative, Saujani shows that the cost of inaction—for families, for our nation’s economy, and for women themselves—is too great to ignore. She lays out four key steps for creating lasting change: empower working women, educate corporate leaders, revise our narratives about what it means to be successful, and advocate for policy reform.

Both a direct call to action for business leaders and a pragmatic set of tools for women themselves, Pay Up offers a bold vision for change as America defines the future of work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982191573
Publisher:	Atria/One Signal Publishers
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	309,309
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Reshma Saujani is a leading activist and the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms. She has spent more than a decade advocating for women’s and girls’ economic empowerment, working to close the gender gap in the tech sector, and, most recently, championing policies to support mothers impacted by the pandemic. Saujani is also the author of the international bestseller Brave, Not Perfect, and her influential TED talk, “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection,” has more than five million views. She began her career as an attorney and Democratic organizer, and she now lives in New York City with her husband, Nihal; their sons, Shaan and Sai; and their bulldog, Stanley.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Big Lie 1

Introduction: We (I) Screwed Up 9

Part 1 The Open Secret of Women and Work

1 Something Has to Give 23

2 The Marshall Plan for Moms 45

Part 2 How Did We Get Here?

3 From Rosie the Riveter to #Girlboss 61

4 The Counter narrative: Women at Home 75

Part 3 Paid in Full: How We Get There

5 The Four Forces of Change 87

6 EMPOWER: Changing Our Reality from Within 95

7 EDUCATE: Reimagining the Workplace 115

8 REVISE: Shifting the Narrative in Our Culture 159

9 ADVOCATE: From Rage to Power 169

Afterword 187

Acknowledgments 191

Notes 195

Editorial Reviews

02/21/2022

Girls Who Code founder Saujani (Brave, Not Perfect) calls for “a full-scale reenvisioning of how we as a society... define ‘work’ ” in this impassioned if familiar manifesto. She makes a case that women “need the system to change” and that equality won’t be found via hard work or through more “girlbosses.” Rather, it can only be the result of big changes in “workplaces, homelife, culture, and governmental support.” She calls for for flexible work, paid leave, and subsidized childcare, bringing political and professional experience to her argument as “the first Indian American woman to run for Congress in New York City.” But her claims about “women and work”narrow to focus on heterosexual mothers in traditional homes and jobs, the section that asks “How Did We Get Here?” is a Wikipedia-shallow dive into the history of women in the American workplace, and her “radical reinvention of the workplace” involves pretty standard policy updates regarding time-off boundaries and national paid leave. Even if the manifesto is not as revolutionary as it’s purported to be, progressive readers will nevertheless find it worthwhile as a forceful, focused, and cogent articulation of these goals. It’s a fine lay of the land, but there’s not quite enough to set this one apart. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Reshma Saujani has helped many women crack the glass ceiling, but now she’s convinced that we need to rebuild the foundation of work itself. Her provocative book will challenge you to rethink some of your basic assumptions about what it will take to create real equality of opportunity.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Originals, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

"Reshma Saujani is a truth teller and builder of movements. For all of the women who have climbed the ladder at work but still find themselves sidelined, exploited, and burned out, this book offers a daring new approach: it's not our job to do more, it's time for our workplaces to pay up."
—Tarana Burke, Executive Director of 'me too' International

"Pay Up exposes the lie that so many high achieving women were indoctrinated with: work hard, do well, and do anything a man can do. Finally, we have a book that aims to fix the system, not the woman."
—Rachel Simmons, New York Times bestselling author of Odd Girl Out

"The last two years have been scary, stressful, and heartbreaking for every family in America, and we're all still searching for a way forward. Pay Up is a moving look at the daily sacrifices women make, and a rousing demand to make those sacrifices visible, respected, and valued. "
—John Legend

"The crisis facing women today isn't just about lost wages, it's about the internal harm done by overwork and the long-term implications for families. Pay Up goes beyond giving advice —it provides clear strategies that empower women to change their workplaces and their homes. This book is a must read for any working mom who wakes up wondering: 'Is this worth it?'"
—Dr. Becky Kennedy, Founder & CEO of Good Inside

From the Publisher

10/01/2021

In the pandemic's first year, women worldwide lost $800 billion in wages, with unemployment among them rising from 3.1 percent to nearly 15 percent. Mothers in particular have reported encroaching anxiety, with almost 70 percent experiencing health problems owing to pandemic-induced stress. Saujani found herself stressed, too—and angered by the ongoing absence of support for mothers. Here she follows up her New York Times best-selling Girls Who Code and Brave, Not Perfect to propose The Marshall Plan for Moms, arguing for structural changes like government payments and workplace and cultural rethinking to help working women. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2022-01-18
The founder of Girls Who Code calls for a “radical reinvention” of the American workplace in ways that would help mothers and other women.

Saujani writes that when she wrote Brave, Not Perfect (2019), she “was still in the throes of promoting the feminist propaganda of having it all via leaning in.” Her view changed during the pandemic—which exposed social and emotional fault lines in her life and others’ and which forced 12 million women from the labor force—and here, she adjusts her course. Expanding an essay for The Hill that called for a “Marshall Plan for Moms,” the author proposes a sweeping array of solutions in an uninspired book comprised of part rant, part self-help, and part “call to action” rooted in three “critical public policies”: affordable child care, paid parental leave, and cash payments to parents. Many ideas appear on bulleted lists called a “Playbook for Employers” and “What Women Can Do,” and while some are worthy, too many are overfamiliar, underdeveloped, or unimaginative. (Managers should “Lead by example,” and women should “Get enough sleep,” an idea that may seem ludicrously impractical to any mother of a 6-month-old.) The writing is merely serviceable, and many of Saujani’s ideas are surprisingly conservative or tame. She never suggests, for example, that working mothers might benefit from joining a labor union or pushing for a higher minimum wage. Worse, while Saujani pays lip service to second-wave feminists’ efforts, she slights them in subtle and seemingly ill-informed ways. For example, she writes that feminists “forgot” to work for “equality in the home via compensation for the unpaid labor we do.” In fact, they fought for it on many fronts, including, among numerous other examples, the Wages for Housework campaign. Saujani mentions her important work with Girls Who Code only briefly; a more enlightening book would have more deeply explored what that experience taught her.

A disappointing take on what America’s working women need.

Kirkus Reviews