It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. The pandemic brought into sharp focus, the crisis we have in caregiving in America. Women bear the brunt of child care, elder care, and household duties, and it has huge costs to the labor force and all of society.

Activist and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani has a proposal to address that,

something she calls the Marshall Plan for Moms,

and she unpacks it with Ted's current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rogers

at a TED membership event.

I found myself in the pandemic but two little kids working full time and you know

girls who go to a Super Bowl ad I mean we were on top of the world and the pandemic hit and I found

myself having to go back to work take care of a newborn homeschool a six year old you know and save my

global nonprofit from being

shut down. And I think for my entire leadership team was mostly, you know, working parents,

working moms. And many of us were saying, well, when the schools open, everything will be okay.

And when the schools didn't open and they came up with this idea of hybrid learning,

you just saw millions of women being pushed out of the labor force.

So we lost, you know, again, you know, decades of progress in nine months.

And the reason why women had to leave the workforce was because half of our daycare centers were shut down.

You know, when you relied on elderly parents to come in and help you take with caretaking work,

they were no longer there or available because everyone was terrified of this pandemic.

You know, for far too long, Americans have always paid, you know, more for their child care

than they pay for their mortgage.

It is the largest cost center of families.

And so when there were no kind of available centers of care,

women who were already doing two-thirds of the caretaking work

...