She Lost the Election. Then She Changed the Internet.
Reshma Saujani failed publicly, repeatedly, and on purpose. It became her philosophy, her movement, and the most important thing she ever taught.
In the fall of 2010, Reshma Saujani lost a congressional election by 45 points.
She had spent months campaigning across Manhattan’s Upper East Side and East Harlem — the 14th Congressional District of New York — knocking on doors, raising money, building a case. She was 34 years old, a Yale Law graduate, a former Wall Street attorney, the Deputy Public Advocate of New York City. She was also, if she won, going to be the first Indian American woman ever elected to Congress.
She didn’t win.
She lost badly. And publicly. And in a city that does not let you forget those things easily.
But on the campaign trail, visiting schools and classrooms across the district, she noticed something. The computer science rooms were full of boys. The girls were somewhere else. No one seemed to think this was strange. No one was even talking about it.
Reshma Saujani was.
Two years later, in a borrowed office space with a small team and no guarantee of anything, she gathered 20 girls and taught them to code. She called the organization Girls Who Code.
Today it has reached more than 760,000 students. Its college-aged alumni choose computer science or related fields at fifteen times the national rate. It helped reverse a decades-long decline in women’s participation in computing. And Reshma Saujani — refugee’s daughter, failed congressional candidate, Wall Street lawyer who walked away — is now a TIME Woman of the Year, the founder of two national movements, the host of a podcast that hit Apple’s Top 10, and the director of a documentary premiering in New York City this June that broke a world record before it even screened.
This is a profile of how she got there. Which means it is, first and foremost, a story about failure.
Where She Came From
Reshma Saujani was born in 1975 in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were Indian refugees from Uganda — part of the Indian diaspora that had settled in East Africa, then been expelled by Idi Amin’s regime in the early 1970s. They came to America with almost nothing, and they raised their daughter in Schaumburg, Illinois, a small midwestern suburb where there were not many other people who looked like them.
By the time she was in middle school, she was already very familiar with racism and prejudice. That’s when her activism started — she founded her own advocacy organization called the Prejudice Reduction Interested Students Movement, PRISM for short. She led her first march when she was twelve.
The daughter of refugees learns certain things early. She learns that the structures people take for granted — safety, citizenship, the right to remain somewhere — are not guaranteed. She learns that belonging must sometimes be fought for. She learns, perhaps most importantly, that the people in the room are not always the ones who built it, and that the people who built it are not always the ones who get credit.
These are not abstract lessons. They became, eventually, the animating logic of everything she built.
She went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for political science. Then to Harvard’s Kennedy School for a master’s in public policy. Then, after failing to get in the first time, to Yale Law School — because, as she has said in commencement speeches, she was convinced her whole career was riding on a degree from Yale. Everyone she looked up to in politics had gone to Yale.
She got in. She graduated. She had, on paper, the perfect resume to do exactly the kind of work she had always wanted to do — policy, advocacy, public service.
Instead, she followed her classmates to a white-shoe Wall Street firm and spent the next six years defending bankers and hedge fund managers accused of securities fraud.
She was, by all external measures, successful. She was, by any honest internal measure, miserable.
The Pivot Nobody Understood
In 2008, she watched Hillary Clinton give her concession speech after the Democratic primary. Something in it landed.
“I graduated from Yale Law. I had the perfect resume to do the kind of work I always wanted to do. And yet, when I graduated, I didn’t end up doing that work. I wanted to ‘be successful.’ I wanted another perfect credential. So I followed my classmates to a job at a white-shoe, Wall Street firm, and spent the next six years defending bankers and hedge fund managers accused of securities fraud.”
She left. She went into public service, becoming New York City’s Deputy Public Advocate. She worked on DREAMer support, campaign finance reform, the daily unglamorous work of city government. And then in 2010, she did the thing everyone told her not to do.
She ran for Congress.
She ran against a 14-term incumbent, Carolyn Maloney, in a district she had almost no structural advantage in. She raised money, built a campaign, made her case. And she lost — badly, publicly, in a city that watches closely and remembers longer.
Most people, in her position, would have retreated. Found a less visible arena. Rebuilt quietly and tried again.
Reshma Saujani did not retreat. She ran for office again in 2013, this time for New York City Public Advocate. She lost again.
Two public losses. Two campaigns. No office.
And in the wreckage of those campaigns — in the classrooms she visited, in the gender gaps she noticed, in the blank screens she kept seeing girls staring at — she found the thing she was actually supposed to build.
Twenty Girls in a Borrowed Office
Girls Who Code launched in 2012. The founding premise was simple and radical: girls were being socialized out of computer science before they ever got the chance to fail at it. Not because they lacked ability. Because the culture around computing had told them, in a thousand small ways, that they didn’t belong.
The proof was historical. In 1984, women made up 37% of computer science graduates in the United States. By 2012, that number had fallen to 18%. The tech industry had boomed, computing had become one of the most powerful and lucrative fields in the world, and women’s participation had dropped by nearly half over the same period. The more valuable computing became, the less welcome women were made to feel in it.
Saujani’s theory was that the solution was not just skills — it was culture. It was teaching girls to be comfortable with imperfection. To write bad code and iterate. To be wrong in public and keep going. To understand that every programmer, regardless of experience, spends most of their time not knowing the answer and figuring it out anyway.
This insight became her 2016 TED Talk: “Teach girls bravery, not perfection.” It has more than 54 million views. It is one of the most-watched TED talks in history. The argument is disarmingly simple: we raise girls to be perfect and boys to be brave, and this asymmetry, compounded across childhood, produces adults where women hesitate and men act — not because of innate difference, but because of what we trained into them.
The talk struck a nerve because it named something people had experienced but not articulated. Parents recognized it in their daughters. Teachers recognized it in their classrooms. Women in tech recognized it in themselves — the cursor blinking, the code not submitted, the idea not voiced in the meeting.
Girls Who Code’s college-aged alumni were choosing to major in computer science or related fields at fifteen times the national rate. The organization reached 300,000 girls, then 500,000, then 760,000. It operated across all 50 states, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. It became, in a decade, one of the most significant interventions in STEM education in American history.
And Saujani kept going.
When the Pandemic Changed Everything
In March 2020, the world shut down. And within weeks, something became visible that had always been true but had been easy to ignore.
The care infrastructure that allowed women to work — schools, childcare, community networks — vanished overnight. Mothers who had built careers over decades found themselves simultaneously holding a toddler, attending a Zoom call, helping with homework, managing elder care, and doing the grocery run. Many of them left the workforce entirely. Within a year, women had lost more than 5 million jobs. The gender progress of a generation was wiped out in months.
“Women have been crushed in the pandemic. Because the care structure is broken, many had to supplement their paid labour with unpaid labour,” Saujani said at the time. “We can’t lose 30 years of progress in nine months.”
She launched the Marshall Plan for Moms in a New York Times op-ed in December 2020, calling on President-elect Biden to create a task force for a historic investment in mothers’ economic recovery — recurring payments for unpaid domestic labor, paid parental leave, affordable childcare, pay equity. The name was deliberate: the Marshall Plan had rebuilt Europe after World War II. What mothers needed was that scale of structural investment, applied to the infrastructure of care.
The movement grew. It became Moms First. In January of 2026, Saujani stood beside Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as they announced a $1.7 billion plan to deliver universal care for children under the age of 5. She had driven $16 billion in federal investments for childcare through years of organizing, campaigning, and refusing to let the issue be dismissed as a “women’s issue” — framing it instead as an economic imperative, a workforce infrastructure question, a calculation with a dollar amount attached.
At an event in September 2024, she asked Donald Trump a direct question about childcare affordability. His fumbling answer went viral. The clip was shared millions of times. Awareness about the cost of childcare in America — which for most families with young children consumes more than 20% of their income, representing a burden of more than $122 billion annually in lost productivity and earnings — reached audiences that had never engaged with the issue before.
That is Saujani’s method: find the structural injustice, name it in economic terms, make it undeniable, and then make sure the person who needs to answer for it is in the room when you ask the question.
The Person Behind the Movements
She lives in New York City with her husband Nihal, their two sons Shaan and Sai, and their bulldog Stanley. She hosts My So-Called Midlife, a podcast with Lemonada Media that launched in 2024 and entered Apple’s Top 10 almost immediately — a show about navigating midlife as a woman that is as funny and honest as it is useful. TIME named it one of the year’s best new shows.
She serves on the Board of Overseers for Harvard University. The Board of Trustees of the Economic Club of New York. The Board of Advisors of the International Rescue Committee — an organization that serves refugees, which feels, given her parents’ story, like a circle being completed.
She has been named to Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders. Fortune’s 40 Under 40. WSJ Magazine’s Innovator of the Year. Forbes’ Most Powerful Women Changing the World. Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People. She won the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education.
In February 2026, TIME named her a Woman of the Year — recognizing, in the publication’s words, a woman working toward a more equitable world. “To be recognized as one of TIME’s Women of the Year at a moment when it feels risky to fight for women — that is the best acknowledgment I could imagine,” she said. “I’m a serial movement builder, and my work is to break down every barrier that stands in the way of women and girls’ progress.”
No Country for Mothers and What Comes Next
Her documentary No Country for Mothers broke a world record before it screened a single frame.
More than 2,500 mothers, caregivers, and advocates signed on as associate producers, shattering the previous record of 1,468 names, which had stood since 1991.
The film is an investigation into what Saujani calls the lies told to American mothers throughout history — the manufactured culture wars, the impossible choices presented as personal failures, the policies deliberately designed to make motherhood and workforce participation incompatible. She argues that the ‘trad wife vs. girl boss’ debate is the latest version of a long-running culture war that distracts from practical solutions like affordable childcare and paid family leave — that the constant pressure moms feel isn’t a personal failure, it’s structural, and that cultural narratives keep families divided instead of organized for change.
The film premieres on June 15, 2026 in New York City — her city — followed by over 1,000 community screenings across all 50 states, one of the largest grassroots documentary rollouts ever attempted in the United States. It will not go on Netflix. It will not go on YouTube. It will travel to living rooms and libraries and community centers, hosted by the people who live there, followed by tools to take action.
“Moms in this country have been getting conned since the ink dried on the Constitution. When moms watch the documentary and learn the history, I think they’re going to be outraged and fired up. And in my experience, there’s nothing more powerful than a pissed off mom,” she said.
What She Actually Taught
Here is the thing about Reshma Saujani that gets obscured by the awards and the titles and the TIME covers: the core of everything she has built is a very simple, very hard idea.
Failure is not the opposite of success. It is the path to it. And the reason women fail less often than men in public, in technology, in politics, in any visible arena, is not that women are less capable. It is that women have been trained, from childhood, to be perfect before they act. To be sure before they speak. To have the answer before they raise their hand. To be qualified before they apply.
She ran for Congress and lost by 45 points. She ran again and lost again. In the gap between those losses, she found Girls Who Code. In the catastrophe of the pandemic, she found Moms First. In the viral moment of a fumbled answer about childcare, she found a national conversation she had been trying to start for years.
She built every significant thing she has built on the foundation of a failure she didn’t hide.
That is, for a woman who spent years on Wall Street chasing perfect credentials, a remarkable thing to have learned. It is also, given what she taught 760,000 girls about blank screens and blinking cursors, perhaps the most important thing she ever taught.
“I need each of you to tell every young woman you know to be comfortable with imperfection.”
She said that in a TED Talk in 2016. She has been living it since 2010.
No Country for Mothers premieres June 15, 2026 in New York City, followed by over 1,000 community screenings nationwide. Learn more and find a screening at momsfirst.us.
Girls Who Code programs and resources at girlswhocode.com.
Reshma Saujani’s podcast My So-Called Midlife is available on all major platforms via Lemonada Media.