For the past 11 months, advocates for women’s societal and career advancement have been in agreement: We have a crisis on our hands. But when it comes to how to tackle the issues at hand—including, but not limited to, inaccessible childcare, the demands of virtual schooling, and the departure of millions of women from the workforce—that consensus starts to fall apart.
One of the splashiest and most creative suggestions came from a group headed by Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Girls Who Code. (Saujani has since announced that she’s stepping down as CEO of the organization, effective April 2.) Based on a belief that the scale of the crisis calls for investment of the kind last seen in the aftermath of World War II, she declared that the U.S. needs a “Marshall Plan for Moms.” At the end of January, 50 prominent women—from Hollywood actors like Gabrielle Union and Charlize Theron to activists like Justice for Migrant Women’s Mónica Ramirez to startup founders like Rent the Runway’s Jennifer Hyman and Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd—offered their support, signing a full-page ad in the New York Times.
The Marshall Plan was the United States’ postwar program providing aid to Western Europe, helping war-ravaged countries with, in part, getting their citizens back to work. Pieces of Saujani’s Marshall Plan proposal include well-established policy proposals like paid family leave, affordable childcare, and equal pay for equal work, each dedicated to helping support women in the workforce. But the part of the plan that got the most attention is one that would actually expand our ideas of the paid workforce: Compensate American mothers for the work they do at home.
“We don’t value what we get for free,” explains Saujani. “We treat American mothers’ unseen labor as our country’s social safety net because we don’t put a value on it.”
Saujani developed the idea for a $2,400 monthly payment to mothers—all mothers, not just stay-at-home moms—in part based on conversations around direct payments for COVID-19 economic relief, coming up with the number by referencing lawmakers’ past proposals for $600 weekly unemployment benefits. And direct payments have been a popular policy proposal in other contexts too (see universal basic income). But the proposal—which, as written, would apply only to mothers, not to fathers or other kinds of caretakers—has turned out to be controversial, even among those who agree on nearly every other idea Saujani’s group champions.
Missing from the signers of the NYT ad were economists and policy experts who work on and study women’s labor force participation full-time. Such experts are largely skeptical of the proposal to pay mothers, saying that such a monthly payment would not address the core issues that led women to leave the workforce during the pandemic and long before, from the devaluation of women’s work in the labor market to the high cost of childcare.
“If the aim of the Marshall Plan is to bring attention to the unpaid labor of women, then fine,” says C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “But if the plan is really meant to bring full economic security for women and families, it falls short.”
There’s also the question of the plan’s emphasis on moms and whether it should be read literally. Those who question it point out that a direct payment specifically to mothers would likely be illegal and would represent a step backward toward the kind of gendered language in U.S. law that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg steadily worked to eradicate during the first half of her career as a lawyer.
Saujani and fellow signers of the plan—many of whom have law degrees themselves—say they expect the proposal’s intended recipients would change were it enacted, but that we “cannot change what we cannot name,” in Saujani’s words. “There’s no way that we are going to get women’s labor market participation back to what it was unless we call it and name it,” she adds. “We need a Marshall Plan for Moms. We don’t need a Marshall Plan for Caregiving right in this moment, in the short term, because we’re talking about the people who are suffering right now.” The focus on mothers is a response to the gendered disparities so many women are living with, she says: “We have to respond to the moment that we’re in, and not the world as we wish it was.”
Amy Nelson, founder and CEO of the coworking business the Riveter, and Samantha Ettus, founder and CEO of Park Place Payments, took the proposal at face value when they read it (neither was asked to sign the NYT letter). They responded with a Newsweek op-ed titled, “We Should Not Pay Women to Be Moms.” Their concern: a payment to only mothers would encourage heterosexual couples to decide that women should stay out of the workforce—and leave out other kinds of families. “It’s important we’re not doing anything to create yet another reason for a man to say to his wife or partner, ‘You should probably be the one to stay home because you’re the one getting paid for it,” says Ettus.
Adds Nelson, “Grandmas and aunties and [same-sex couples] and everyone else taking care of families—we want to do a policy that encompasses all of those groups.”
Signers of the proposal and its critics are in agreement on some issues, including the need to center women of color, who have been forced out of the workforce at drastically higher rates than white women over the past year (though the current Marshall Plan website does not include a strategy for how to do so).
Despite the inclusion of specifics like the $2,400 monthly payment, Saujani says the Marshall Plan for Moms proposal is a call to action—a call to create a Marshall Plan for Moms, not a full plan on its own (one ask is to launch a government task force on the issue). Plus, she views some criticism of the idea as coming from a place of privilege, prioritizing theory over getting money in the pockets of women who need it. Economists and other experts would need to be involved to take this proposal from concept to policy, she says.
Saujani isn’t the only one to come up with direct payments as a solution, a twist on the usual child or childcare tax credit. The Biden administration has proposed its own plan to aid parents—not just mothers—with checks between $250 and $350 a month. GOP Sen. Mitt Romney has offered up an alternative proposal from the other side of the aisle, calling for similar monetary assistance.
Still, there are some compelling reasons to direct economic aid to mothers specifically, depending on what problem you’re trying to solve, says Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. Extra income has a more positive impact on child poverty when mothers, rather than fathers, are the recipients of that money, research has found. But childhood poverty is yet another complex problem, and it is not the one the Marshall Plan group explicitly set out to address with this campaign.
The policy debate around how to best support women and moms will undoubtedly continue. (One recent entry: a 50-page paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research dedicated to “bold policies for a gender-equitable recovery.”)
“In this moment, everyone wants to be part of the solution and strategy, and I applaud that,” says Mason. “But these issues are very nuanced. All ideas can be on the table—but not all ideas have the same weight.”
Disagreement about how to approach these complex problems is expected—and even welcomed—by many of the women trying to solve them. “Men have been debating policy for centuries,” says the Riveter’s Nelson. “We need multiple voices from women.”
