Reshma Saujani’s ‘My So-Called Midlife’ On TIME’s 10 Best Podcasts List
- The activist and founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First has candid conversations with accomplished women who offer guidance on finding happiness at a challenging time in a woman’s life.
Reshma Saujani’s new podcast about embracing midlife has made it to TIME’s 10 best podcasts of 2024. In “My So-Called Midlife,” the activist and founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First has candid conversations with accomplished women who offer guidance on finding happiness at a challenging time when kids are leaving the home, careers stall, and the body begins to shift.
Saujani told The WIE Suite that she started the podcast to tackle midlife head-on and, shatter misconceptions surrounding it and offer some advice. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping women and girls find power and happiness by challenging the narratives and structures that hold us back,” she told the private membership community for extraordinary women leaders. But as she entered her 40s, “leading a successful non-profit, married to a great guy, mom to two sweet boys and a cute dog,” she was still somehow asking, “Is this it,” she said. “I had a realization: Women have been conned about midlife,” she continued.
She hopes the show “gives the millions of women who are experiencing midlife alongside me permission to rethink what’s possible and join me in exposing the con we’ve been sold about middle age.”
The Lemonade Media project premiered on Oct. 16 and has had an array of early guests including actress Louis-Dreyfus, economist and parenting guru Emily Oster, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Saujani found Moms First, previously known as Marshall Plan for Moms, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as millions of women were forced out of the workforce, the press release said. “ The organization has worked to successfully introduce Marshall Plan for Moms legislation in Los Angeles, New York City, and in Congress, “ according to the non-profit. “It has launched the National Business Coalition for Child Care, to work with industry leaders across the private sector to equitably provide child care benefits for employees and speak out on child care as a critical economic and infrastructure issue.”
A first-generation American whose parents were Indian refugees from Uganda, Saujani grew up in Illinois and attended the University of Illinois (majoring in political science) and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before earning her J.D. from Yale Law School. She began her career as an attorney and political organizer.
In 2010, during her campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives seat for New York’s 14th district, Saujani witnessed the stark gender imbalance in computing classes while visiting local schools. So she started Girls Who Code, which equips girls and young women with computing skills to be competitive in the technology sector, in 2012. Ten years later, the organization has taught more than 500,000 girls through direct in-person and virtual computer science education programming and generated 14 billion engagements globally through marketing and advocacy campaigns. Girls Who Code, which is working toward a goal of closing the gender gap in new entry-level tech jobs by 2030, was named the most innovative nonprofit organization by Fast Company magazine in 2019.