Honoring the Women of SaverLife

March 8th is International Women’s Day. Appropriate to the occasion, it is also the day that my husband Doug and I are due to welcome a second baby girl into our family! Bringing a new life into the world is still a time of great joy, if muted this year by worries about keeping my family healthy, and the isolation that comes from being unable to fully celebrate and seek support from our family and friends as we did when our precious Evelyn arrived three years ago. 

On a somber note, March also represents a grim milestone as we reach the one-year anniversary of the global pandemic, the effects of which are borne so heavily by women and mothers. To acknowledge the contribution of women everywhere, SaverLife is dedicating the month of March to the resilient women of our online community, now almost 500,000 strong. 

Our members represent those hardest hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic—female-headed households with dependent children—who have faced unprecedented job loss and rising household expenses, exacerbated by the challenges of school closures nationwide. 

We will start with the release of an important piece of research—“The Parent Trap”—that specifically highlights the impact of school closures and lack of affordable childcare on the household financial stability of low-income mothers. 

Next, we are launching a new series called “Hardest Hit: Unheard Voices of the Pandemic” that tells the stories of five mothers, the challenges they faced during the pandemic, and the lengths they went to in order to keep their families safe, housed, and fed. 

This project is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “Voices of Economic Opportunity Grand Challenge” which seeks to broaden the conversation about the issues inhibiting economic mobility. The stories—and the SaverLife data that underpins them—are powerful. I hope you will support our efforts to amplify this work and ensure that real stories—not stereotypes and assumptions—make it into the public and political discourse and inform the road to economic recovery.

In the meantime, we have compiled our top learnings from 2020 in our SaverLife Research Year in Review. Please check it out if you are interested in learning more about our most effective savings experiments, the economic impact of the pandemic on our members, the efficacy of cash payments, and much more. 

I will be on leave until July. I am truly grateful to the incredible SaverLife team who will do a fabulous job continuing the work in my absence, and to all of you for your ongoing support of women leaders everywhere.

See you in a few months (maybe even in person!)

Leigh