Corporate websites can do a good job indicating the way companies want themselves to be seen, but it can be tough to get trustworthy firsthand information about their workplace culture. Glassdoor has patched up a good portion of this information gap, but there’s still a shortfall of intel for women who are curious about how female-friendly a prospective employer is.
Providing that intel is the goal of Fairygodboss, a site that has been called “Yelp for maternity leave benefits.” On it, women write anonymous reviews of their employers, sharing information about whether the company has a generous maternity-leave policy or values work-life balance. It’s becoming a valuable resource for lots of women, especially those who are mothers or plan to be.
The idea for Fairygodboss occurred to one of its founders, Georgene Huang, when she was job hunting a few years ago while two months pregnant. Huang was looking for companies that were friendly to women and wouldn’t “mommy-track” her career, but she found little in the way of helpful information online. Huang, along with her former colleague Romy Newman, started Fairygodboss in March of last year, and since then the site has collected over 19,000 reviews on over 7,000 employers. The majority of the site’s reviewers are American workers, and, site-wide, the median age range is 25 to 34 and the median salary range is $80,000 to $100,000 a year.