Carol EvansCEO and PresidentWorking Mother Media MPA Breakfast with a Leader SeriesMay 4, 2005New York, NY
Working Mother Media is one of the most exciting publishing companies in America. I don’t say that just because I was crazy enough to acquire working Mother magazine in 2001—3 weeks before 9-11—but because of the remarkable work we have been doing since then to build a unique company that successfully blends mission with business drive. A company that combines consumer advertising with b-to-b dollars, long term vision with the short term requirements of an entrepreneurial company, and enormous hard work with the magic of the dazzle blue door.
When we moved into the Lincoln Building we built a combination office/conference room for me and we decided to paint the door a color called Dazzle Blue—and it is dazzling. The dazzle blue door to my office is a reminder of how much we are building and how dazzling our work is. Everyone should have a dazzle blue door for their CEO’s office.
I have to confess: many nights at 3 in the morning I lie awake and wonder why I chose to do this. I wake my husband up with a poke of my elbow and worry through one or two sticky business problems left over from the day. The pain of being an entrepreneur, of being responsible for an important magazine and all that we have built around it is balanced—most nights—by the enormous joy of developing new strategies for winning, building on old ones, and seeing the company grow. And we have built a lot in three and a half short years.
Influenced deeply by the events of 9-11, our new company met in November 2001 to write a mission statement for Working Mother Media. Our statement was simple: “To Serve Women Boldly.” We have been achieving that mission ever since. Acquiring Working Mother after being away for 12 years meant re-examining everything—listening to customers, seeking out readers, and then taking a whack at getting it right with some enormous changes.
We noticed that our circulation needed some real improvement, so we cut our rate base by 20%. Not without some fear in our hearts, but our idea was to cut big and build from a smaller base with natural growth, rather than stretching every day to make rate base. And we’ve had two solid rate base increases in three years—by serving our subscribers boldly.
We also noticed that working mothers had changed a lot. Gone were the baby boomer days when we all wore big shoulder pads and worked until we collapsed from fatigue. Generation X wants it their way: job sharing, work at home, flextime, all the programs that we had spent years advocating for had come to fruition, and we needed to catch up. So we redesigned the magazine for Gen X moms three years ago, and continue to keep up with this fast moving demographic every month. The June issue, coming out in a few days, is going to knock your socks off!
Our readers are perhaps the most vibrant market on earth. Young, affluent, educated, these are career-committed moms who want to be the best moms they can possibly be, and the best professionals they can possibly be. And we are serving these women boldly.
There are 47 million mothers in the country, and they divide into three fairly even groups: stay-at-home moms, moms who consider their jobs as “just a job,” and moms who consider their jobs a career. Our magazine attracts the top 2.5 million women who are part of that last group: career-committed moms. These moms care deeply about their careers and their families. We at Working Mother make it our job to remind them to care about themselves as well.
We serve this high-energy, high achieving mom boldly with a combination of smart ideas, easy solutions, groundbreaking research and plenty of homegrown advice, from Susan Lapinski in her Editor Mom column, from yours truly in my CEO Mom column, and from dozens of readers who we feature in every issue. We are the only magazine that is bold enough to actually put a reader on the cover each and every month.
Perhaps the boldest way we are serving women is through our Best Companies for Women of Color initiative, which has been growing like wild fire. Looking at the strength of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list, which we launched back in 1986, I realized that this model of rewarding companies for supporting talented employees could have a huge impact on women of color in this country. And looking at MRI, I found that 28%--800,000-- of our readers were women of color—a higher percentage than any mainstream women’s magazine.
When we launched the Best Companies for Women of Color, we discovered that the wage gap was just the tip of the iceberg. As we worked on this new list we found that companies were not aware of the cultural barriers to advancement facing women of color and that no one was really talking about their needs. And so we started not just a list, but a dialogue. This year, over 2,000 women—of all colors—will come to our conferences and our regional town halls to break into separate racial groups and then come together across races to explore what separates us, and what can bring us together. Companies send high achieving and high potential women to these events in New York, Chicago, San Jose, Redmond, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston and Houston. We’re serving women boldly all over the country.
When we first announced the list we pulled together our advisory board of some great minds: academics, corporate diversity leaders, journalists and researchers. These experts told us that we might not find any companies who could be named best companies for women of color. I laughed and said that wasn’t possible. Look at the 100 Best Companies. That first year, when only 10 companies applied for the list, I realized that they were right.
Companies were afraid to apply for the list because they didn’t have the data broken out by race and gender, because they didn’t know what the best practices were for supporting women of color and because they didn’t want to make the list if they didn’t have the right programs and cultural support in place.
In our third year of this initiative, we have 60 companies sponsoring our initiative, we have 400 companies sending their employees to our women of color events but we have only 20 companies who applied for our list.
The barriers and obstacles show up in our meetings, and in our research for the list. Part of the application is an employee satisfaction survey. Even at the best companies, where women of color express high levels of satisfaction, on every question, women of color score at least 5 percentage points lower than men and white women for being satisfied. But the work is being done, and is being celebrated, boldly, may I say, in our June issue—which was our most successful June issue in history.
The granddaddy--or grandmamma—of all lists is the 100 Best companies for working Mothers. The application for this list asks 500 questions, and takes a big company nearly 1,000 man-hours to fill out. We measure companies on what they are doing in parental leave, childcare, flexibility, workplace culture and advancement of women. Companies are also scored for how many people actually use these programs.
This year we are celebrating 20 years of the list, and it continues to build as an integrated property. Our annual 100 Best Companies Work Life Congress generates $1.6 million in revenue and the October 100 Best Companies issue sells $2.3 million in advertising. Last year we created “Lessons from the Best”—data pulled from the applications winners and losers can use to assess their own position and areas for improvement. And now we have launched “Shop the Best”—our answer to Lucky, you could say, where we help our readers find products made by the family friendly companies on our list.
But the best thing in my book about the 100 Best Lists is that companies have actually paid attention to the marching orders we give each year. Big, powerful companies have come to realize that we aren’t whining, or asking them to pay attention to the needs of working mothers for the sake of doing good. We are showing them how to succeed. They need the intellectual capital, the creative energy, the stamina and clarity that their working mother employees have to offer. Our best practices show them how to attract, retain and energize that talent. We show them the return of investing in their working mother employees. We ask them to serve women boldly for their own good.
I’d like to tell you just one important thing about the third list we support—the NAFE Top 30 companies for Executive Women. This list, published in February each year, takes a deep look at what companies are doing to move women up the corporate ladder to positions of real power. This year we measured a new metric. We asked companies to tell us how many women in their company hold profit and loss positions. We know that nationwide, women hold only 9% of all P&L jobs, and that this is one of the primary contributors to the wage gap. We now have a way of measuring specific companies on how they stack up in this critical metric for women’s success.
So now you see what I see every day at Working Mother Media: a company that is a blend of business and mission, of consumer and B2B, of long term thinking and short term strategy. Our dedicated employees work hard for the company, but we keep our focus on our own work life balance as well. We own three prestigious measurements of American companies, we produce 25 conferences and events that draw from and support the lists, we operate the largest national association for women, and we publish what is still today a unique magazine for women, that treats readers with respect for their intelligence, and supports them in their exciting lifestyle—all with pizzazz and verve of our own. There is a lot going on behind the dazzle blue door!
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