Developing An Innovative Tool to Help Parents Tackle Financial Planning with Siran Cao and Mel Faxon of Mirza

In this week’s episode, Sam welcomes Siran and Mel, the Co-Founders of the important new tool, Mirza. This app serves a multitude of purposes, from researching fertility options to understanding financial costs, and navigating parental leave for busy working parents. Mirza is for any type of family structure, income bracket, and can be a great resource for the most organized person to someone who just prefers to wing it. Sam speaks with Siran and Mel about why they decided to create Mirza, the staggering statistics on the parent pay gap in the workplace, and ideas on structurally adapting how we ask professional parents to balance their time and energy rather than our current band-aid fixes. What You Will Discover This Week: We all seem to know that child care and family expenses may one day be on our horizon, but very little of us plan for it financially. There is a parent penalty, even when men and women return back to the workplace. We don’t have an equity in how we share household work at home, and we need everyone who touches this ecosystem to be part of this solution. Siran and Mel each give their backgrounds, and discuss how they became Co-Founders of Mirza, and some takeaways on how to better communicate with your Co-Founder or work partner. Mirza is a tool for new and prospective parents not just to get by, but to become more financially secure and navigate the very confusing world of maternity/paternity leave and parental pay gaps. Although Mirza was launched pre-pandemic, we need it more than ever with over 4.6 million payroll jobs lost by women since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States. Of those, 32% of jobless women aged 25-44 cite the reason they don’t return as lack of child care. Supplying gyms at work so we can stay there our whole day is not an answer! Nor is paying for women to freeze their eggs. What we need is more paid time off, more support, and not to come back to jobs that limit our possibilities of financial growth. Mentioned:...