How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani
Reshma Saujani (guest), Steven Bartlett (host), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Reshma Saujani and Steven Bartlett, How I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani explores from Bullying To Billion-Scale Impact: Reshma Saujani Rewrites Power Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and author of *Pay Up*, traces her journey from a bullied immigrant kid in the American Midwest to a movement-builder who has taught nearly half a million girls to code. She explains how childhood racism, crushing student debt, and two failed political campaigns forged her grit and sharpened her sense of purpose. Reshma details the rise of Girls Who Code, including its cultural strategy to make coding aspirational for diverse girls worldwide, and candidly shares the personal costs—repeated miscarriages, burnout, and perfectionism—of building a global social enterprise. She then pivots to her new mission: moving from “fixing women” to fixing systems, arguing for childcare, paid leave, cultural change around motherhood, and a redefinition of leadership and risk.
From Bullying To Billion-Scale Impact: Reshma Saujani Rewrites Power
Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and author of *Pay Up*, traces her journey from a bullied immigrant kid in the American Midwest to a movement-builder who has taught nearly half a million girls to code. She explains how childhood racism, crushing student debt, and two failed political campaigns forged her grit and sharpened her sense of purpose. Reshma details the rise of Girls Who Code, including its cultural strategy to make coding aspirational for diverse girls worldwide, and candidly shares the personal costs—repeated miscarriages, burnout, and perfectionism—of building a global social enterprise. She then pivots to her new mission: moving from “fixing women” to fixing systems, arguing for childcare, paid leave, cultural change around motherhood, and a redefinition of leadership and risk.
Key Takeaways
Trauma and exclusion can be transformed into long-term purpose and activism.
Reshma’s house was vandalized with “Go back to your own country,” and she was violently beaten at 13 for being Brown. ...
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Credentials open doors, but they also trap people in misaligned careers.
Determined to gain credibility as a woman of color, Reshma applied to Yale Law School three times, eventually earning degrees from Yale and Harvard—and about $300,000 in debt. ...
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Public failure, if processed deliberately, becomes a training ground for entrepreneurship.
Running for Congress at 33 against a powerful incumbent, Reshma faced smear campaigns, racism, and media trivialization (the New York Times profiled her shoes instead of her policies) before losing “spectacularly. ...
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Girls become interested in coding when it’s tied to purpose and culture change, not just skills.
When Reshma started, only 0. ...
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Evangelical, “all-in” leadership can scale missions—but easily crosses into self-neglect and burnout.
Reshma describes Girls Who Code as her religion and admits she expected similar devotion from staff, often getting the praise–criticism balance wrong and assuming others viewed the job as a calling. ...
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The dominant “fix the woman” feminism obscures structural problems in work and caregiving.
Reshma now regrets aspects of her earlier ‘Brave, Not Perfect’ message because it focused on women changing themselves—leaning in, power posing, delegating—rather than changing workplaces and policy. ...
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Boundaries, rest, and intentionally wanting less are critical to sustainable impact.
After years of miscarriages and overwork, Reshma enforced hard boundaries at home (she does mornings, her husband does nights, and she leaves the house to avoid being pulled back into caregiving), tracks sleep with a Whoop, plays tennis, and says no to most travel she would have automatically accepted. ...
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Notable Quotes
“I remember watching him and thinking, ‘I will never be like him. I will never be silent. I will never not fight.’”
— Reshma Saujani
“Here I was, 2008, the world is falling apart, and I'm sitting in a fricking hedge fund as a lawyer. I'm so far away from that little girl who's staring at the clouds.”
— Reshma Saujani
“I wasn't gonna let failure break me.”
— Reshma Saujani
“When I started Girls Who Code, 0.4% of girls were interested in coding… and then we ended up with 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs.”
— Reshma Saujani
“I've been selling this lie for the past 10 years… that the problem is you, and if you just fix yourself, you can have equality.”
— Reshma Saujani
Questions Answered in This Episode
You describe that eighth‑grade beating as ‘100% of who I am.’ If you were designing school or community programs today, how would you help kids process similar trauma so it fuels activism without leaving them unprocessed pain for decades?
Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and author of *Pay Up*, traces her journey from a bullied immigrant kid in the American Midwest to a movement-builder who has taught nearly half a million girls to code. ...
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Looking back at your $300,000 in student debt, what concrete alternative path would you now advise a young immigrant woman to take if she wants credibility and impact without that financial burden?
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When the New York Times reduced your groundbreaking race to a story about your shoes, is there anything you wish you’d done differently in real time to seize back your narrative—or is that an unrealistic expectation given the power imbalance?
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At Girls Who Code’s peak intensity—back‑to‑back flights, miscarriages, and constant growth—what specific operational or cultural safeguards could have been put in place to protect you and your team from burnout without slowing the mission?
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Your four‑pillar framework in *Pay Up* (empower, educate, revise, advocate) demands both corporate and policy change. If you had to pick one measurable win to prioritize globally over the next five years—subsidized childcare, mandatory paternity leave, or something else—which would it be and why?
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Transcript Preview
I gotta figure out how to teach every single girl to code. That's how the world's gonna be a better place. (dramatic music)
Founder of, CEO of Girls Who Code.
Best-selling author.
Reshma Saujani.
I was often bullied at school. Our house would get spray-painted, "Go back to your own country," and my mother just takes a look at me and she's just crying. And I remember thinking, "I will never be silent." So I ran for Congress. Then New York Times finally acknowledged my race and they sent a reporter. They were knocking on doors. We had young girls having my poster up. She then decides to write a story about my shoes.
Yeah, fuck you.
I'm not buying into that bullshit. I wasn't gonna let failure break me. When I started Girls Who Code, 0.4% of girls were interested in coding, and then we ended up with 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs, and then we exploded in India and in the UK, and girls were interested in making the world a better place.
In building Girls Who Code, tell me about the other side.
You know, at the same time I was trying to build Girls Who Code, I was trying to have a baby. I had more miscarriages than I can count. Think when you are a social entrepreneur and you're building something. The work is never done, and it's always at the sacrifice of others. For me, I got that really wrong, really wrong.
So what advice would you s- give to people who are probably veering towards another rock-bottom in their lives?
I think-
So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO, USA Edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (lo-fi music plays) Reshma, I am... As I was reading through your story, it reminded me of a quote that I read many years ago, and I, I saved this quote in my bookmarks in Twitter. And so I went and looked for this quote when I knew you were coming here today, and it, and it somewhat resonated with me in terms of your story. The quote is, "My parents were tasked with the job of survival and I with self-actualization. The immigrant generational gap is real. What a luxury it is to search for purpose, meaning, and fulfillment." And I know you came, or at least your parents came here from Uganda.
Mm-hmm.
Take me back. Take me back to your childhood and the context in which you were molded.
Yeah. Well, my parents escaped the dictator Idi Amin in 1973. They changed their names from Mukund and Madhu to Meena and Mike, uh, 'cause I think a recruiter told my dad that the only way he was gonna get a job as an engineer, instead of... he was working as a machinist in a factory, was to change his name. I think about them often, because I can't imagine in my 20s coming to a new country, leaving your entire family, or having to leave your entire family, not having a single person that you know, not knowing the language, and having to build a life for yourself. And they did it, um... You know, they did it with a smile. They never really complained about it, and then everything became about giving us the life that they had sacrificed so much to have.
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