Nearly two years ago, the pandemic pushed women out of the workforce in droves. As they’re still fighting their way back in, they’re already working overtime, juggling professional responsibilities and ambitions with caregiving expectations that largely fell on women’s shoulders during the crisis.
A new benefits company is now working to ease some of those burdens. Mirza, which launched in 2020, is a paid leave and financial wellness company designed to help working parents — particularly mothers — manage their caregiving and financial responsibilities so they can stay in the workforce.
“Our mission is to close the gender wage gap — and because 80% of that gap is due to the motherhood penalty, we wanted to also tackle the child care crisis,” says Siran Cao, referencing the moment when a woman slows or stops her career after having children. Cao, who serves as Mirza’s CEO, cofounded the company with friend Mel Faxon, in an effort to enable employers to help employees stay in the workforce, by providing financial-planning support through a caregiving lens.
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Mirza provides employees with an online platform that helps potential, new and existing parents navigate the challenges of family planning and raising children, and focuses on helping them understand and calculate the different costs associated with parenthood — like child care services. Mirza can also integrate with employers’ HR systems so the platform can provide better navigation of family leave policies, provide the employer with metrics and insights on the child care needs of their workforce, and manage financial support for child care, if provided by the employer.
“We're able to reduce costs and make sure employees and companies alike are actually really aligned on how care is the future of work,” Cao says.
The CEO recently connected with Employee Benefit News to discuss how Mirza is supporting employers and employees by merging care and financial wellness benefits.
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Not a lot of people look at financial wellness through the specific lens of caregiving. Why does this seem like such a no-brainer to you?
Child care is one of those critical pillars for parents’ financial health. So while we are piloting this platform that does elements of financial wellness and scenario planning for caregivers, building in the ability for employers to support that cost of care is really the element that can change the math parents have to do.
Talk to me about the ‘motherhood penalty’ — why is this still plaguing families in 2021?
The motherhood penalty is this very insidious thing. When you look at the data you see that men and women are at parity levels of pay early on in their careers, and it seems to be pretty 50/50 in a lot of the higher wage industries. But that starts to taper off in our thirties when we’re reaching manager levels. And it’s at that point in time that our careers can really start to accelerate, but that is also the age and the point in time when we're starting families. The motherhood penalty is really that hit in earnings for women when we take time out of work for caregiving.
So we’re trying to give families and individuals that information to change that math and that default, where you sacrifice one parent’s earnings against the cost of care. We’re completely reframing child care from a cost to an investment, and when you reframe it that way, you create the kinds of grassroots level thinking that we need to change how we look at parenting and caregiving as a woman's responsibility.
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Financial wellness and care benefits have been huge topics during the pandemic. How have you seen employers help employees manage these challenges?
There's definitely been an uptick in employers trying to tackle how we can help caregivers’ mental health. There's been more companies really looking to add in some backup care, and we've also seen some more creative solutions, like allowing employees to choose a caregiver that works best for their family and get reimbursed.
We're in a moment where companies are trying to understand the ways that they can help support caregiving, but in a more budget friendly way. We think of our work as showing employers how care is an investment for them as well. We fundamentally think of caregiving not as an individual responsibility and not as a nice-to-have benefit, but as an overarching important pillar of employee compensation.
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We're trying to help employers design an all encompassing solution that tackles employees’ routine care needs, that critical thing you need to be able to work every day, not just on the day that the school is closed because someone was sick in the classroom. Employees need smart ways to handle those last minute care needs.
What should employers keep in mind regarding financial wellness and care benefits as we head into 2022?
We can't count on available child care for employees. The caregiving and child care sector has been decimated by the pandemic. There has to be an understanding from employers that a flexible work schedule is really key, and that needs to be available and implemented for everyone. That will enable workers to actually focus on high value things at work, as well as have the time and mental space for the caregiving that they're going to face.
