Saujani worked at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where she defended securities fraud cases,[13] and on a pro bono basis handled asylum cases.[14] In 2005, she joined the investment firm Carret Asset Management.[14] Subsequently, she joined Blue Wave Partners Management, a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, the global alternative asset management firm specializing in private equity. She was an associate general counsel at Blue Wave, an equity multi-strategy hedge fund; it was closed in the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse.[13] Immediately prior to running for Congress, Saujani was a deputy general counsel at Fortress Investment Group.[15] In 2012, Saujani founded Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization which works to close the gender gap in technology.[16] In 2015, she collected a salary of $224,913 from the organization, according to Internal Revenue Service filings.[17]
In September 2015, Reshma Saujani was named to Fortune Magazine's 40 Under 40 list.[18]
She has been featured on NY1, MSNBC, FOX, and CNBC.
In September 2011, she was named one of City & State's "40 under 40" for being a young influential member of New York City politics.[20]
2010 House election
Saujani challenged incumbent Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney in the 2010 House elections. Saujani's previous work for and link to Wall Street firms was seen as a liability to her credibility and acceptance by Democratic primary voters.[21] Saujani won the support of Jack Dorsey, co-founder and chairman of Twitter;[22]Randi Zuckerberg, director of market development for Facebook and sister of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg;[23] Alexis Maybank, co-founder of Gilt Groupe;[24] and Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook.[25] Saujani outraised Maloney by almost a 2-to-1 margin in the last quarter of 2009,[26] when Maloney had ceased fundraising following the death of her husband, Clifton Maloney, who in September had died unexpectedly on a mountain-climbing expedition in the Himalayas.[27] Saujani's candidacy received the backing of prominent Upper East Side political fundraisers, including Cathy Lasry, Maureen White, and White's husband, financier Steven Rattner.
A poll commissioned in the spring of 2010 by the Maloney campaign showed Saujani trailing Maloney by more than 68 points. The same poll found Maloney to hold a favorable rating of 86%.[28] Saujani's campaign mailed a flyer to voters implicating Maloney as one of eight House members investigated for taking donations from special interests.[29] Maloney won the primary by receiving 81% of the vote to Saujani's 19%, winning the Manhattan, Queens, and Roosevelt Island portions of the district across the board by decisive margins. Saujani received 6,231 votes,[30] despite her campaign's expenditure of $1.3 million,[31] spending more than $213 for every vote she received.
Saujani's campaign was the first political campaign to use technology tools such as Square, Inc.[32]
In January 2013, Saujani's Wikipedia page was heavily edited to remove traces of Saujani working for Wall Street firms such as hedge funds. Her campaign admitted to this,[36] arguing they did it because they disagreed with the stated facts.[37]
Girls Who Code
Photo from Girls Who Code Launch Day
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2012 after visiting schools and becoming aware of the gender disparity in computing while campaigning for Congress.[38] Saujani was a speaker at the 2016 TED Conference, with her talk focusing on encouraging young girls to take risks and learn to program.[39] In February 2018, Saujani launched a companion podcast of the same name to her book Brave, Not Perfect.[40] Since launch, it has featured guests including First Lady Jill Biden, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. In January 2021, she placed advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post calling on the Biden administration to support the passage of a “Marshall Plan for Moms” in the form of a resolution introduced by Representative Grace Meng and pass a series of financial relief executive actions benefiting mothers and women in the workforce.[41][42]
Books
Saujani is the author of Women Who Don't Wait in Line: Break the Mold, Lead the Way, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013,[43] and Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World, published by Viking in August 2017,[44] and Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder in 2018.[45]
She is the author of the book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think) published in March of 2022.[46]
Personal life
Saujani is married to entrepreneur Nihal Mehta, who was a co-founder of ad tech startup LocalResponse and now is a co-founding partner of Eniac Ventures, a seed stage venture capital firm.[47] Saujani is a practicing Hindu.[48] They have two children.[49][50]
^Uttara Choudhury. "Creating history: Reshma Saujani to run for US Congress". www.dnaindia.com. Retrieved 20 October 2015. Saujani's bid has all the ingredients of a weak opponent beating a stronger one scenario. The daughter of Gujarati immigrants, Saujani's story embodies the promise of the American Dream. Her parents came to the US as political refugees after Idi Amin expelled Indians from Uganda in the 1970s. A qualified mechanical engineer, Saujani's father found work in a machine shop... Living as one of the first Indian families in suburban Chicago, Saujani faced discrimination. But as a gutsy freshman at the local public high school, Saujani started PRISM — the Prejudice Reduction Interested Students Movement. She said "it was a defining moment" in her life that sparked her commitment to community activism
^Palash Ghosh (10 September 2013). "Reshma Saujani, New York Candidate For Public Advocate: Daughter Of Indians Expelled From Idi Amin's Uganda". www.ibtimes.com. Retrieved 20 October 2015. Reshma Saujani, a candidate for the position of public advocate of the City of New York, is the descendant of Indian immigrants – but with an unusual family history. Saujani, who was born in Illinois, is the daughter of Gujarati parents who were expelled from the East African nation of Uganda by then-dictator Idi Amin in 1972...The so-called "Ugandan Asians" have since carved out their own particular destinies over the past four decades in India itself, Great Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, the United States and elsewhere as one of the most well-educated and prosperous groups of refugees that world has ever seen.
