Reshma Saujani on the “Midlife Penalty “and Why She Has No Plans to Age Quietly
Show Snapshot:
Stop letting society tell you your best years are behind you. Author, activist, podcaster, and polymath Reshma Saujani (founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First) is turning up the volume as she approaches 50. Reshma calls BS on what she calls the "midlife penalty"—the price we pay in status, health, and earning power as we age. We get into the biggies like: How do you rebel against a culture that wants you invisible? What does the "midlife penalty" cost women over 50? How can we evolve to become "broken open" versus burning out? In a world that calls on women to shrink (and then disappear at a certain age), this convo is a call to keep expanding, beauties!
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Quotable:
We are getting so many messages from culture that we should shrink, that we should hide, that we should go away, that we're past our prime, that the best is behind us, and so it takes an active amount of rebellion against that.
Transcript:
Reshma Saujani 0:00
I think the biggest pay gap for women is women over the age of 50. The Harvard Business Review did a study on this. They look at us and they say she's going to go into menopause and she's going to have to care, give for her parents—I mean, or her children. Sorry, not sorry, right? So we are literally penalized for aging.
Katie Fogarty 0:21
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host Katie Fogarty. Today we welcome Reshma Saujani, a powerhouse activist who's dedicated her career to transforming the landscape for women and girls. As the founder of Girls Who Code and the current founder and CEO of Moms First, Reshma has spent years building movements that tackle everything from closing the gender gap in tech to fighting for the structural changes working mothers desperately need, like affordable childcare and paid leave.
She is a New York Times bestselling author whose TED Talk "Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection" has over 54 million views. She recently jumped into the podcasting pond with her show "My So-Called Midlife," which quickly hit Apple's top 10 and was named one of Time magazine's best new shows of the year. She joins me to discuss reinvention, navigating midlife, and why these conversations matter more than ever. Welcome to A Certain Age, Reshma.
Reshma Saujani 1:15
Hi! Great to be here, Katie.
Katie Fogarty 1:17
I am excited. I'm excited. I've been following your work from afar for a very long time. You have built two major movements—Girls Who Code and Moms First—that have reached and impacted the lives of millions of people. You are still building Moms First as CEO, yet you recently found time to launch a podcast, "My So-Called Midlife." You obviously had midlife. What prompted you to explore this life stage so publicly?
Reshma Saujani 1:43
I mean, I found myself like in my own sort of midlife crisis, kind of in my mid-40s. My dog was dying. I was transitioning between Girls Who Code. I kept waking up every day being like, "Is this Groundhog's Day?" Like every day felt the same, Katie. I think I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. And here's the thing—like, there's nothing more I love than a good conversation. And every time, like, my girlfriends in my life are all kind of doing that negative self-talk. I'm like, "Ooh, something's going on here."
And my experience of midlife—feeling like I was too young before I was too old, or I went from being like the hot girl at the bar to, like, as Brooke Shields says, like the lady at independence—and there was no playbook, right, for this middle period of my life that was so damn long. And my husband was having a very different experience. I was like, "Oh, something is up here." And so I started "My So-Called Midlife" because I wanted to explore this stage of my life, talk to amazing people, and really come up with a playbook, right? And really shift my own mindset that this can be like the best time of your life.
Katie Fogarty 2:48
Yeah, absolutely. On your podcast, you have a great group chat. You talk about that in your podcast description—you said, "I'm pulling you into the group chat." The group chat is pretty phenomenal. It's got guests ranging from Gloria Steinem to Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. You've interviewed a lot of women I've had on the show too, like Dr. Kelly Casperson, Dr. Mary Claire Haver. You've had almost 50 of these conversations right now. Are you seeing the same sort of struggle and questioning from your guests? Have any patterns that have emerged for you?
Reshma Saujani 3:22
Yeah, I feel like a lot of my guests—the first question I always ask is, "What's your mindset?" Because I'll be honest, like, I'm turning 50 in November, and I'm still kind of stuck. I am not at the place of, "Oh, this is amazing." I still have some anxiety about aging. I'm not exactly looking forward to getting older, like, I'm not there yet. And so this podcast has really kind of been my pump-up, right, to get to the place where I'm like, "Oh, midlife is great." But ironically, I would say 90% of the women I have interviewed are like, "Yeah, this is fucking awesome. Midlife is great."
Reshma Saujani 4:24
And I'm like, "All right, tell me how you got here." So, like, you know, I was just interviewing—this hasn't come out yet, but I was just interviewing Dr. Sharon Malone, and I was asking her, like, "Okay, how do you get that transition between when you're like, okay, not being the hot girl at the bar? Like, when did—how? Like, what switches you?" I mean, in your mind, where you're okay not having the male gaze, the male gaze, or not chasing the male gaze. Because we all agree, right? Like, when you can get over the male gaze, you have more time. When you can get over this cultural
Reshma Saujani 5:00
lie, right, that you are irrelevant, you become more relevant. I know it. I get it. Like, I get it, but how do you get there? How does it happen? Is it just a switch that happens one day when you wake up? Is there a meditation I need to do? Is there a green juice I need to drink? Do I need to do some ayahuasca? Like, how does it happen? How do I get there? And I think that's the, like, really interesting part of the podcast—is really learning a lot of these kind of tips and tricks and things that people have done or experienced to see what's gonna work for you.
Katie Fogarty 5:30
Well, I can't wait to listen to the episode with Dr. Malone, because I've interviewed her twice too, and I think her—she has so much wisdom. She's got such great perspective. I am, like, obsessed with her. It's embarrassing. She's incredible.
Reshma Saujani 5:44
Fan girl. I follow her around.
Katie Fogarty 5:46
Listeners know she is phenomenal. And it's interesting, because I love to hear that 90% of people are lit up. I mean, I hear you on what's scary and hard about aging. I'm watching my own mom not be able to remember things. She's in the early stages of that sort of the cloud of dementia, Alzheimer's, sort of changing herself—and those things are frightening. But I think, unlike you, I spent time as a stay-at-home mom. I came back to work at different times and sort of iterated my career, but not at the level you have. I mean, you've run for Congress, you've started two gigantic movements, you have a bestselling book, you have a TED Talk viewed by 54 million people. And by any measurement—and women often get measured unfairly—but by any measurement, you were doing well, like you've built this incredible life.
And for me, it's like, I feel like, ironically, I've become more visible in midlife than I was before by creating this podcast, by talking to new people. What role, if any, do you think your like gold-plated resume maybe played in
Katie Fogarty 6:54
how you got here and looked around? Do you think there was any...?
Reshma Saujani 6:59
Yeah, 100%
Reshma Saujani 7:03
Because it wasn't doing it for me anymore. I would get excited about out of bed because I was launching a new thing, or I was writing a new book, or I was like—like, I was ambitioning, right? And I woke up and I was like, "Oh, my God, that's not doing it for me anymore." I know I'm a workaholic. I love work, right? I love it. It's the thing that gets me excited, it's the thing that makes me happy, but that wasn't doing it for me anymore, and that really kind of freaked me out, because I was like, "Is the best of my life over?" And my mind and my heart was also moving in a different direction.
And this is, I think, the part that was really powerful. I was feeling much more spiritually inclined. I was much more stuck in the thing of understanding some traumas—I mean, some, or just places where I was stuck as a human, right? Like, I'm really bad at forgiveness, right? And knowing that that was like—or I was really... One of the things I think I've really been getting unstuck about in midlife is part of what has served me is I am pretty damn resilient. There's not a lot that just floors me. I could watch the saddest movie ever, and it does not make me cry. And I was feeling in midlife that I was a little bit more emotional, a little bit more broken, a little bit more—my heart was open. And I started working with a monk who I now have a standing every-other-week date with, and he, Rosna, has really explained to me, right, like that, this is good, right? That like, how can I as a movement builder, as a moral advocate, how can I understand and speak up for other people's pain and suffering when I don't even understand my own?
Katie Fogarty 8:54
That's such a profound question. And have you—where are you at right now? Or is this still like a work in progress? Is it something that you're—have you had moments of clarity around how you're gonna move forward, or is it still like an evolution?
Reshma Saujani 9:10
I think it's still an evolution, but I feel like I've made a lot. One, I feel like I'm pretty broken open, meaning like I can be brought to tears, like my heart is open. And in the past couple of months,
Reshma Saujani 9:20
I'm really challenging, just like with the hits on DEI from a Girls Who Code perspective. I'm on the board of Harvard. I've given some pretty tough commencement speeches, so I have just been in this world of,
Reshma Saujani 9:35
"Why can't people be brave or kind? Or where's the empathy anymore?" Like, so I'm pretty broken open, and so when I see the world's cruelness, I'm really affected by it.
Reshma Saujani 9:51
And I'm not gonna say I wasn't, obviously I was in ways before, because that's really my work, but now it's like harder for me to recover, if that makes sense, personally.
Reshma Saujani 10:00
Finally, right?
Reshma Saujani 10:02
As I would say, I've been brought to my knees more than once, right, I would say, over the past couple of months. And I think he would say, "That's a good thing." Pre-midlife Reshma would be like, "Ooh, that's the danger signal."
Katie Fogarty 10:17
Yeah, I mean, because what if you're so broken that you can't pick up again? I'm thinking of that Japanese art form where, like, the pottery fractures, and then they piece it together with gold. I'm forgetting what the name of it's called, but it's like where you take all these component parts and you create something more beautiful from it. Like midlife can be a phase of iteration and sort of emerging through this portal of this change.
I mean, when you were talking about sort of being broken open, I'm thinking about where I went through sort of late-stage perimenopause, where I was weeping and raging alternately at my poor family living with me, and it was just like, "I'm like, is this ever gonna end? I'm like, my brain had been hijacked."
Katie Fogarty 10:54
It was going on during the pandemic. It was going on during—we were living through an amoral president for the first time, and he's back—and it was just so hard to feel like dislocated in my own brain when the world felt broken apart as well. And we're at another strange phase of life. We are where we're back in this moment in time where our systems are being destroyed, where it feels like there's a lot of just heedless, mindless treatment of things that are important and that have grown up organically, that are being diminished. And you're doing it through midlife.
Do you feel for yourself that, like, your transition through, like your hormonal stuff? I don't know where you are in peri or menopause or beyond, but do you feel that any of that has played a role in your cracking open?
Reshma Saujani 11:35
Absolutely. I mean, I definitely feel like I'm in the thick of it. I can't take HRT just because I have autoimmune issues. I have more of a risk to blood clotting, but I'm doing testosterone, and
Reshma Saujani 11:56
that has been great.
Reshma Saujani 11:58
So I'm managing my symptoms, which is not fun, and so my sleep is shit. Like I sweat all the time. I definitely have a lot more anxiety and anxiousness, right, that I just didn't have before. So I feel like, yeah, that's huge, you know? I mean, and I exercise a lot, and like, I want to be strong and fit, and my body aches, and it hurts a lot more, right, than it did before. So I feel like I've had to spend more time, in a good way, though, like, on really trying to focus and prioritize my health. I don't spend as much time as I would like to, but that's like the thing that I'm—that is definitely, definitely a big part that makes this moment even harder.
Katie Fogarty 12:40
For sure, when we don't feel well, when we're not sleeping well, it's hard to manage anything, and there's so much to manage these days, including our mindset around what's happening in the world around us.
Katie Fogarty 12:58
I want to ask you a little bit about that. When you created Moms First, which is the initiative that you're running now today as CEO, and I would love for you to talk a little bit about that to our listeners. This gained massive traction during COVID, and it took a global pandemic for the world to focus in on how seriously under stress moms were. Why did it take this moment to get America to examine the lack of support for women and working moms? And what has changed since then?
Reshma Saujani 13:29
Yeah, I think the reason why—where I think things came to a head is like—nothing had... The pandemic didn't exactly make things worse, meaning that women were already doing two-thirds of the unpaid labor, two-thirds of the caregiving work. We already had—the only industrialized nation that doesn't have paid leave. Fifty percent of parents were in debt because the cost of childcare. Fifty percent of people were living in childcare deserts. Like all of that structural brokenness was there before the pandemic. I think what the pandemic did was it exacerbated it, right? So it definitely exacerbated the care crisis, because schools were closed and daycare centers were shut down. But I think what it did even more powerfully was it shifted the cultural narrative.
Because I think what the cultural narrative was before the pandemic is, "I'm gonna lie
Reshma Saujani 14:18
about how hard motherhood is. I'm going to show you my perfectly manicured children in my amazing vacation, in their perfect outfits with my smiling partner, and I'm going to pretend I'm doing it all, and it's going great." Reshma, are you hanging out on my Instagram feed?
Reshma Saujani 14:38
Right? Like, I'm not going to show you the mess behind the scenes. And I think the pandemic, you had to show the mess behind the scenes because your kids were interrupting your Zoom screen, or you were just exhausted and tired, and people realized, "Oh my God, I didn't just marry the wrong person who doesn't do the laundry.
Reshma Saujani 14:55
I'm just not a horrible delegator or like a bad mom.
Reshma Saujani 15:00
All of us are being screwed, right? Like we are basically being set up to fail before we even had our first cup of coffee." And I think that collective appreciation that it—oh, it's not just me, it's not my personal failure, my personal problem. It is a collective structural issue—was, I think, the change that we needed to get a real fighting chance at making these structural changes like childcare and paid leave.
Katie Fogarty 15:26
Reshma, we're heading into this quick break. When we come back, I want to hear what's different since the days that this was spotlighted and there was more of a glare on this topic, which had existed sort of in hiding for too long. We'll be back in just a minute.
[AD BREAK]
Reshma, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we talked about how COVID really turned the white hot glare—a spotlight—on an issue which had been hiding in plain sight.
Katie Fogarty 17:55
You launched Moms First several years ago. It was initially the Marshall Plan for Moms. It's evolved. It's become Moms First. Tell us what you think has changed and what still needs to change. I'm sure it's a big mountain we still need to climb.
Reshma Saujani 18:08
So I think what's changed is we are shifting the conversation that childcare is a personal problem that you have to fix and solve to: it is an economic issue. Workers can't work without childcare. Businesses don't work without workers. And I think one of the big, I think contributions that Moms First has made is in that space, and is engaging the private sector. So we built the first ever National Business Coalition on Childcare to start getting businesses to—one,
Reshma Saujani 18:40
if government's going to fail and we're not going to give you childcare benefits and supports, then the private sector has to step up and step in. And so we have over 250 businesses that are part of our coalition that are not only providing more childcare benefits to their workers, but then are serving as advocates. We did the first ever report that showed that you get a return on your investment if you're a company and you provide childcare.
So I think the movement that we have made—for those nerds out there that look into policy on many issues, oftentimes, business is the impediment to getting policy change, right? And so having business be an ally for childcare and paid leave is like a critical, I think, step in getting us closer to getting paid leave and childcare and getting businesses to be this ally, which 100% we need them to be allies in everything in terms of like closing the gender pay gap and being supportive of women as they go through menopause in the workplace.
Katie Fogarty 19:35
I've heard you talk recently about the midlife penalty, because when we think about childcare, sometimes you're thinking about younger working moms
Reshma Saujani 19:42
That's right.
Katie Fogarty 19:43
...kids that require it. But I'm somebody whose kids are 25, 22, and 18, and I am squeezed between, like, their needs, helping my previous—college application—and caring for my
Katie Fogarty 20:00
mom with her Alzheimer's. I am literally making her dentist appointments and bringing her to them while trying to have, like, I have two jobs
Katie Fogarty 20:07
and I'm not alone. No, this is everyone's story that I know. So talk to us about the midlife penalty that you have identified also and how it exists for women, even if you don't have kids in elementary care.
Reshma Saujani 20:19
I mean, listen, I think the biggest pay gap for women is women over the age of 50. The Harvard Business Review did a study on this. They look at us and they say, "She's gonna go into menopause and she's gonna have to care give for her parents"—I mean, for her children. Sorry, not sorry, right? So we are literally penalized for aging, and just like the motherhood penalty, where we recognize that, like, you actually got a pay cut the minute you became a mother, because you were discriminated against the workforce, the same thing happens, if not even more so, for women in midlife.
And so it's something that we have to address and talk about. Oftentimes, when we talk about the gender pay gap or even pipeline programs, we're focused on getting younger women into the workforce, but we don't spend enough attention on seeing the amount of women we push out of the workforce when they approach 50, right? And it's an enormous brain—enormous brain drain of talent and wisdom and everything that we need. And it's even more important, because the reality is, is we're living longer—yes, much longer. So like, women need those earnings, right, well into the fact that, like, you don't retire at 55 now or 50 and like, just make it to Social Security. That period of time is much longer, which is why you're actually seeing more women fall into poverty and older.
If you look at what happens with Social Security, for women who didn't work and were reliant on their spouse's income, they don't get the full amount of his retirement benefits, they get like a third. So there's all these provisions and policies in the law that actually discriminate against women in midlife, and there has not been conversation at all or advocacy at all about this. I think we're making some progress because of menopause advocacy, right, and starting to pay attention to that, which is amazing, and we have to take all of that energy and effort and continue and look at all the ways women in midlife are being roadblocked, facing obstacles or being discriminated against.
Katie Fogarty 22:07
Reshma, this is your spin-off. It's going to be Older Moms First,
Reshma Saujani 22:12
Probably.
Katie Fogarty 22:14
...because it's so true. We need to make sure that there's an economic safety net under women who've been working for so long. And as you pointed out, we're moving into a five-generation workforce today. The US is on track to have more people over the age of 65, and 2030, than under the age of 18, and everyone's living longer and healthy lives, and women are living longer, longer than men. So we need to make sure that that is there for them.
And I also say this sometimes, like when people talk about gendered ageism, and I talk about it a lot. This impacts everybody, everybody, everybody, because data shows that people start to experience a sense of ageism in the work world around 35. And when you start—when you can't, like, when the sniper is picking your heads off, and you hit a certain age,
Katie Fogarty 23:11
younger workers see that too. The fear is baked into them at an age when they shouldn't even be thinking about this.
Reshma Saujani 23:18
I mean, it's really a crisis. I mean, the fact that 30% of young people who just graduated from college can't get—graduated from college can't get a job, and we're pushing older women out of the workforce. It's such a workforce crisis that we're in right now that in so many ways, in new ways that we're not talking about.
Katie Fogarty 23:37
Well, you're leading the charge, and I'm excited to hear that you also have rolled out a new initiative, which I caught wind of because I follow you on social media, which I love. You launched something called Power Moms with Marie Claire. It's the first ever Power Mom Award, and recent winners were actor and activist Gabrielle Union and CEO Laura Modi of the organic infant formula company Bobby. And I want to hear from you. What do you think makes a power mom?
Reshma Saujani 24:00
I mean, look, I think a power mom is a mom who refuses to believe that motherhood is a limitation or something to hide.
Reshma Saujani 24:08
She refuses to buy that false choice between being a trad wife or a girl boss, right? And it's someone who understands that we exist in the middle, right, and that it's a yes-and. It's give me the freedom to move in and out of the workforce, let me define what motherhood means for me and take away the structural biases that prevent me from fully being a mother and a worker or a dreamer, whatever that is for you. And so I think a power mom is a mom who's willing to fight for that fight. And it's also to be visible, to wear both hats visibly, to be the CEO of a company, but to talk about your children.
Katie Fogarty 24:42
Yeah, I can still remember going to an event in New York where a mom got up and basically a female executive who was a mother got up and shared that she used to like, take bites out of apples and leave them on her desk so that when she like, ran home to do something or to see the kids play, like people would think she would
Katie Fogarty 25:00
still be there. Oh my god. She was just saying, "Wow." She said, "I felt like I couldn't mother visibly." And one of the things I think
Katie Fogarty 25:09
keep going. No, I think it's so fascinating. I've been thinking about this. I don't know if you see this, Katie, but I feel like there's the resurgence of the girl boss, and she has come back with a vengeance. And the resurgence of the girl boss says that there is no work-life balance. "Don't even bring up that question. Don't even ask me that question in an interview." And you're seeing that really hard again right now, and you're seeing that juxtaposed with this kind of glorification of a trad wife. So we are so in the binary right now, and it's really interesting.
Katie Fogarty 25:42
Yeah, there's not enough room for nuance. Well, that's why I think one of the superpowers of midlife is you finally get to a place where there's nuance, where you—or at least I feel like I have. I mean, I was much more of a black and white thinker, and I like, I vote how I vote, and you do this, and I do that. But now I truly—no one gets to the north side of 40, as you pointed out, without going through hard things. I think that no one gets to the north side of 40 without—well, hope not no one, because we're seeing plenty examples of people who don't behave this way. But all the women who come on my show are women who have recognized that we exist in a gray area, and part of being in the messy middle and finding our way through is to open our mind to other possibilities and other ideas.
Reshma Saujani 26:27
I think that's right. I think the thing is, though, then we have to figure out, how do we get a bunch of moms who are no longer facing childcare, for example, to fight for something that is not affecting them right now? Because I think we get so good as women of living through the pain, forgetting about it, and then moving on, and then not—and that's why they are able to kind of get away with this, right? Because we forget, or we move on. And then there's another generation, and they get fired up, and then they've tried to fight. And so whereas if we could figure out how to expand the pool of allies to like—when I'm just, again, I'm talking about childcare right now—like, women who no longer need affordable childcare, men, you know, I mean, like grandmas, like people who are just like, "No, if I had that back then, I wouldn't have had to experience X, Y and Z." Like, this real commitment of making it better for the generation.
Katie Fogarty 27:19
It's visibility, which is exactly what your award's doing, what your organization's doing, because people have to visibly—they've got a mom out loud. The tagline of this show is "age out loud." I'm fully a believer that if we're not willing to share our age out loud, it's never gonna change the story of what it looks for people coming behind us, and I'm seeing that in the menopause movement as well. People are menopausing out loud in ways they didn't used to. I mean, Drew or Oprah, Michelle Obama. We need a very visible CEO, a female CEO, to talk about menopause at work too. And sort of celebrities are doing it because they have a different kind of soapbox. But I really think we need a business leader to menopause out loud at work too, just sort of normalize the conversation, because that's how change happens. And you've seen that like just the spotlight—visibility is such an important foundation to build the rest of it on.
Reshma Saujani 28:11
Yeah, that's how you pull people in. I think that's right. And I think oftentimes we're able to kind of discriminate against women in particular through shame. Yes, right? It's "I'm gonna make you feel embarrassed to breastfeed in public," right? "So then I don't have to actually make it possible for people to breastfeed," right? Or "I'm gonna make you embarrassed for leaving work because your kid is sick. So I'm gonna make you, like, feel like you have to, like, bite that apple and put it on your desk." It's because "I'm gonna make you feel like you're failing at your job, or you're cheating or you don't care about your work," right? It's all about "I'm gonna make you feel shame to keep you oppressed." And I think it is—like, why I love what you're saying about doing it out loud is removing the shame. You will not shame me for this.
Katie Fogarty 28:56
Yep, and when you remove the shame, it leads to action. It makes you powerful and unstoppable, honestly, like the moment you're no longer embarrassed to talk about something or to embrace it, then they can't put you back in the box.
Reshma, I know our time is coming to a close. I know that you're off to do some podcasts of your own. I'm so excited that you joined me today. But before I let you go, I do want to ask you,
Katie Fogarty 29:26
sort of building upon this notion of shame and being more visible and being more public, after having recorded 50 shows with this incredible who's who of women—everyone, if you haven't yet, needs to click clack over to Reshma's podcast, because it's a stellar list of women having these conversations, surfacing these ideas and these sort of stories. Has it changed in any way the way you are approaching midlife today versus the day you first hit record on the podcast?
Reshma Saujani 29:55
Absolutely. Like, like taping "My So-Called Midlife" has just has made
Reshma Saujani 30:00
me—I absolutely believe that midlife is a mindset. I also believe that it's not an easy on and off switch, that like it is an everyday practice, because we are getting so many messages from culture that we should shrink, that we should hide, that we should go away, that we're past our prime, that the best is behind us. And so it takes an active amount of rebellion, yeah, against that. And so you need real like tools and tactics to get there. And I have absolutely, absolutely learned some of those from
Reshma Saujani 30:40
changing. I think being physically strong is really important to being mentally strong, right? And so
Reshma Saujani 30:47
learn that, no, I can't go do—smash myself in workouts, nor do I need to, right? And then I can actually move and operate at a different space. I think the second thing is like I can rest and relax and let go of my need to maybe—I don't show up at the reception that I agreed to go to, and it's okay, right? It's okay to put myself and, like, my time first. It's okay to take a three o'clock nap, you know? I mean, yes,
Reshma Saujani 31:14
and right? Picturing it's a gorgeous Friday when we're recording this, I'm like, it's more like me and my Bernedoodle, like
Reshma Saujani 31:22
in my New York City apartment, but I'm sorry, hammock, right? Yeah, I think it's like the permission to live life at your own terms. And I think if I can—I'm figuring out how to teach millions of women to do that. And I really do believe that when we can unlock that, like we will have unlocked women's power, because it is true. If you get to a certain age and you don't care about what other people think, you don't care about the male gaze, you have more time because you're not trying to dress and impress for others. You're able to take care of your health, you know, I'm saying, in a way that you weren't able to before. You're able to use all your wisdom and intelligence towards the things, right, that are important for you in the world, for you to pay attention. I mean, there are women at 60 that are getting their master's degrees, and I love it, right? You look at Nancy Pelosi—like she ran for office at—so, like, my point is, like, who says that? Like, if you don't do it by your 20s it's done. You could have—make the biggest impact in your life or in the world, starting at age 50. I mean, how about that?
Katie Fogarty 32:30
I know we have 30, 40 more years ahead of us. It is exciting. It's exciting. It's exciting. It's a great way to say it. It is exciting. It is exciting. Well, I'm excited. You came on today. I know you've got a busy schedule. I really enjoyed this conversation. She ran for Congress, so this is a total treat for me to spend time with you.
Reshma Saujani 32:50
Well, I was so excited to get your note, and I'm so excited we chatted. And I love what you're doing, too, and so—and I'm excited to be in sisterhood with you.
Katie Fogarty 32:58
Terrific. Thank you so much. Reshma, thank you.
Katie Fogarty 32:59
This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. I love this conversation. Hanging out with fellow podcasters is so much fun. I always love hearing what they're up to, what they're bringing out into the world. If you enjoyed this conversation, if you now have "My So-Called Midlife" podcast on your radar, or if you've learned from other guests on the show about books, resources, tools or incredible women that you are now following, please let me know in an Apple Podcast or Spotify review. I absolutely adore hearing what you take away from the show. Reading your reviews truly lights me up, and it helps other listeners find the show. So you know what to do. Head to wherever you listen, drop us a five-star or written review. I love seeing them. Thanks for sticking around to the end of the show. Thanks for hanging out with me again on this Monday. And special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.