2020 Year in review
This blogpost is written by our two co-founders, Mel Faxon and Siran Cao. They look back on 2020, the year Mirza was brought to life.
On January 10th, 2020, Siran and I sat down for coffee in my now-permanently closed coworking space. 2020 was still going to be my “year;” Australia wasn’t completely on fire yet; George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were still alive and I was freshly back from a visit home to my family. At the time, I’d been researching menopause, perimenopause, and why women have so little information about what to expect with their own bodies.
As Siran and I chatted about all of the surveys I’d done and the conversations I’d had with womxn, the biggest takeaway that we noticed was that womxn think about our bodies and our careers on separate tracks. This message is internalized from day one - “to be successful in our careers, we have to be as similar to men as we can be.” Family and career should be separate - we should be able to isolate our identities within each sphere and not demonstrate any signs of potential weakness down the line. However, as womxn, it is precisely this intersection of family and career that dictates our future success. We were incited - we mapped out timelines and information and solutions to this problem of helping women understand how to best manage and capitalize in this intersection, and thus began the ideation of Mirza.
There is a common rhetoric that women can “have it all” - we can have careers; we can be incredible moms; our time is infinite. The flip side of that: our time is viewed as less valuable. When you look more closely at the gender pay gap, you’ll see that 80% of it can be contributed to the “motherhood penalty,” or the lifelong downshifting of a woman’s earnings after the birth of a child. It is this disparity that we want to tackle with Mirza, by creating a world where all parents can truly choose whether or not to continue working or to stay at home.
Addressing what can feel like an insurmountable challenge would be difficult in any circumstance. Starting a company during a pandemic has had numerous challenges and yet numerous positives that wouldn’t have been possible without the current situation.
The negatives are easy - setting boundaries between work and personal life is next to impossible; we’ve hired people we have yet to meet in real life; brainstorming sessions look much different over Zoom.
The positives - we managed to avoid the “FOMO” that you often hear founders speak about, the nights they stayed in working away, the things they had to miss out on. We missed out on nothing because no one was doing anything social. We’ve been able to hire people from around the world - while it may be a long time until we meet them without a screen between us, we’ve been able to recruit incredible talent from around the world.
2020 has been pretty incredible for us (as Founders), to be honest. We’ve conceptualized and built a beta product in 8 months; we’ve hired a team; we’ve raised some pre-seed funding; and we are ready to come out swinging in this new year, with new features being added and another round of fundraising ahead.
At the same time, the problem that we’re tackling - the gender pay gap - has only become more of a goliath. The recession that we’re facing has been called a she-cession due to the disproportionate impact COVID is having on women. 17% of working moms quit their jobs during the pandemic. And 25% of those who are still working are considering downshifting or leaving the workforce entirely.
The US remains the only OECD country that doesn’t require paid maternity leave, meaning only 20% of US employees are eligible for paid parental leave. And when parents go back to work, the average cost of childcare is 31% of a family’s income. We need to do so much better for working parents.
2021 will continue to have its challenges. Life won’t be normal again for a while, and neither will the way that we work. But we’re still going into the new year with the same resolution - to kiss the motherhood penalty goodbye.
