Reshma Saujani
Women leave technology and senior roles at every stage of the pipeline, and the reasons are now well documented: a culture that rewards perfectionism over risk, and a workplace built for workers without caregiving responsibilities. Most organisations respond with policy statements and employee resource groups. What they need is a structural account of why their female talent is stalling and a tested set of interventions that work.
Reshma Saujani builds the institutions that change how women and working parents experience the workplace, from Girls Who Code to Moms First.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Reshma Saujani
- She has founded and scaled two of the most recognised gender-equity institutions in the United States, Girls Who Code and Moms First, and can speak to what actually moved the numbers in each.
- She brings a working policy and product track record, including federal Marshall Plan for Moms legislation and the PaidLeave.ai tool used by tens of thousands of parents in its New York pilot.
- Her argument on perfectionism, drawn from “Brave, Not Perfect” and her TED stage, gives senior leaders a concrete diagnosis of why high-performing women self-select out of risk and visibility.
- “Pay Up” reframes the future of women and work around the motherhood penalty rather than individual ambition, useful for CHROs designing caregiver policy that holds under scrutiny.
- A New York Times bestselling author with a Yale JD and Harvard MPP, recognised by Fortune, Forbes and Fast Company, which travels with senior boardroom and executive-program audiences.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Moms First, the national advocacy movement for paid leave, affordable childcare, and pay equity for caregivers.
- Founder and former CEO of Girls Who Code, which has reached hundreds of thousands of girls through in-person programming and a New York Times bestselling book series.
- New York Times bestselling author of “Pay Up”, “Brave, Not Perfect”, “Women Who Don’t Wait in Line”, and the Girls Who Code series.
- TED2016 speaker, “Teach girls bravery, not perfection”, one of the most viewed TED talks on women in technology.
- McGraw Prize in Education; Fortune World’s Greatest Leaders; Forbes Most Powerful Women Changing the World; WSJ Magazine Innovator of the Year.
- Yale Law School (JD), Harvard Kennedy School (MPP). First Indian American woman to run for US Congress.
Biography
The female pipeline in technology and senior leadership does not leak in the places organisations assume. It leaks at the points where the workplace stops accommodating risk-taking and caregiving. Reshma Saujani has spent fifteen years building the institutions that address both of those failures directly.
Girls Who Code, which she founded in 2012 after running for Congress and seeing the gender gap in computing classrooms first-hand, became one of the most recognised pipeline interventions in American technology, with hundreds of thousands of girls reached through in-person programmes and a New York Times bestselling book series. Her 2016 TED talk “Teach girls bravery, not perfection” reframed the problem as cultural, not technical, and is one of the most cited talks on women in tech.
Moms First, which Saujani launched in 2021 as the Marshall Plan for Moms, moved her work upstream into the structural economics of caregiving. The organisation has driven federal legislation, the creation of a New York City task force, and PaidLeave.ai, a working AI tool that helps parents claim benefits they are owed and processed tens of thousands of users in its first New York pilot.
Her arguments land in boardrooms because they come with proof of execution. “Brave, Not Perfect” and “Pay Up”, both New York Times bestsellers, give senior leaders a usable diagnosis of why their female talent stalls and what to change. A Yale JD and Harvard MPP, recognised by Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, and WSJ Magazine, she is read by the policy world and the executive audience at the same time.
Key speaking topics
- Women in technology and leadership
- The motherhood penalty and caregiver economics
- Paid leave, childcare, and workplace policy design
- Perfectionism, risk, and the career consequences for women
- Building gender-equity institutions at scale
- AI applied to social policy and benefits access
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers redesigning caregiver, parental leave, and return-to-work policy
- Boards and executive committees benchmarking gender representation against credible structural interventions
- Heads of DEI, women’s leadership networks, and high-potential women’s development programmes
- Technology leaders responsible for early-career pipeline and retention of women in engineering
Audience outcomes
- A clear structural account of why women stall in senior pipelines, separating cultural drivers from policy drivers
- Concrete examples of paid leave, childcare, and pay-equity interventions that have moved measurable outcomes
- A working diagnosis of perfectionism as a career-limiting pattern, with language leaders can use with high-potential women
- Evidence of how AI can be applied to benefits access and social policy, drawn from PaidLeave.ai
- A sharper view of the business case for caregiver infrastructure, beyond the standard wellbeing framing
Talks
A working account of what actually shifts female representation in technical roles, drawn from building Girls Who Code from scratch.
Key takeaways:
- Where the pipeline genuinely leaks and where organisations misdiagnose the problem
- The role of risk tolerance, mentorship, and sponsorship in female technical careers
- What organisations should stop funding and what they should fund instead
A diagnosis of perfectionism as the trained behaviour holding high-performing women back, and what leaders can do about it.
Key takeaways:
- How perfectionism is taught differently to girls and boys, and where it shows up at work
- Why the most capable women decline visible risk, and the career cost of that pattern
- Practical language and prompts for managers coaching high-potential women
How AI can be deployed against inequality rather than against workers, drawn from building PaidLeave.ai.
Key takeaways:
- What it takes to ship an AI product that meaningfully changes benefit access
- A working model for ethical AI design that is not a compliance exercise
- Where private-sector AI capability can do public good without displacing labour
A reframe of imposter syndrome as a structural problem, not an individual deficit.
Key takeaways:
- The historical roots of the imposter label and who it has served
- Why “fix the woman” interventions fail and what replaces them
- Organisational design changes that reduce the experience at source
A data-led account of the motherhood penalty and the policy levers that change it, drawn from “Pay Up”.
Key takeaways:
- Why the “having it all” framing distorts caregiver economics
- The four interventions that consistently move outcomes for working mothers
- How employers can act ahead of policy rather than behind it