Fairygodboss: A Site Where Women Can Review Their Employers' Female-Friendliness

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.

Recently, Huang and Newman analyzed the site’s reviews in order to identify the top five factors that correlated with women’s satisfaction in the workplace. Some of the results were not exactly surprising, but it’s useful to have some numbers demonstrating the impact of family-friendly policies. Fairygodboss’s dataset, which used a five-point scale to measure job satisfaction, indicated that women were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with workplaces that had long and inflexible hours. On the other end of the spectrum, women with jobs that promoted work-life balance generally reported high levels of satisfaction.

Newman, one of the co-founders of Fairygodboss, notes that the longer maternity leave a female employee took, the more satisfied she was with her job—a finding Newman said she hadn’t seen recorded before. “It’s particularly interesting because so many companies are considering expanding [maternity-leave benefits] past 12 weeks,” she says.

The percentage of women who rate their job satisfaction as a 1 on a 5-point scale increases as the duration of their leave decreases. Meanwhile, the percentage who rate their job satisfaction at 5 goes up as leave duration increases.

Another conclusion from Fairygodboss’s data was that women who reported that female employees were treated equally were much more satisfied at work. So were women who said that management teams weren’t composed mostly of men. Newman explains that this is probably about the perception of fairness and opportunity: If there aren’t women in management, it’s harder for junior workers to imagine getting promoted or having a long and prosperous career at a particular company.

“Women often leave organizations because of negative work-climate issues like a lack of advancement opportunities or excessive hours,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Studies and a member of the site’s advisory board. “What Fairygodboss found is in line with research showing that women are drawn to and stay with companies that provide them with growth opportunities and family-friendly environments. Companies with gender-balanced management teams and cultures that support flexible work send a strong signal to women that they are welcome.”

"There’s a lot of debate over whether gender-diversity programs or considerations are really worth pursuing,” says Newman. “Does it really return to your bottom line? And I think what that statistic says is yes.”

About the Author

Bourree Lam is a former staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously the editor of Freakonomics.com.

The story was notably loud. Its retraction is notably quiet.

On Tuesday of last week, the day after The Washington Post published its bombshell about President Trump’s Oval Office divulgences to Sergey Lavrov and Sergei Kisliyak, Sean Hannity took to the air at the Fox News Channel to discuss a murdered man named Seth Rich. Rich, a 27-year-old staffer at the Democratic National Committee, had been gunned down in Washington, DC, in July, seemingly the victim of a violent crime. Earlier that day, however, a local Fox TV station had reported—in a claim that would quickly be debunked—that Rich had ties to WikiLeaks, and that his death was, rather than the tragic result of random violence, instead evidence of a deeper conspiracy.

In the days since, that idea has leapt to life in the conservative areas of the media—an easy symbol, in the minds of many, of the “mainstream” media’s stubborn and partisan refusal to report on a story that would put the DNC in a negative light. (“Silence from Establishment Media over Seth Rich WikiLeaks Report,” Breitbart seethed.) And so, as many members of the nation’s press corps set out to further the Post’s reporting on the White House, the Rich story became a chorus-like feature on conservative-leaning media—and not just in Hannity’s extra-bombastic corner of Fox News. The Rich story hit Drudge. It exploded on social media. “NOT RUSSIA, BUT AN INSIDE JOB?” Breitbart asked, provocatively. The site added that, “if proven, the report has the potential to be one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history, dispelling the widespread claim that the Russians were behind hacks on the DNC.”