“We want to be like TripAdvisor for women in the workplace”
– Ursula Mead, Founder of InHerSight
InHerSight is a tech company out of the US that has launched a completely anonymous platform to measure how well companies support woman employees — from office suites to executive suites, in cubicles and in warehouses — and accelerating change for women in the workplace.
We chatted with the Founder of Inhersight, Ursula Mead, to get the scoop on how Inhersight works, how it’s contributing to change for women in the workplace, and how Canadian women can get involved! Q: What is InHerSight? A: InHerSight is an anonymous company ratings platform for the modern professional woman who knows how much of her life she will spend working and that all workplaces are not created equal in their support for what women need to be successful, and who understands the power of the collective. Women rate their current or former companies on 16 categories that reflect the different ways women define success at different stages of their lives and careers. Those ratings serve two purposes: Aggregated ratings from women employees at one company generate a “scorecard” so we can see at a glance where individual organizations thrive and need to improve to recruit and retain more women. We also use that data to match women on our platform to companies and jobs that have what they’re looking for. Beyond job-seeking and reviewing, InHerSight users can also tap our career resources: They can read our editorial coverage for and about working women, ask questions in our anonymous community, and download our mobile app to track their career goals. We aim to serve the entirety of women’s careers. Q: What inspired you to create InHerSight? A: I feel a deep desire to accelerate change for women. We’ve made great strides toward gender equality at work, but there’s still so much to be done. Experts say we’re decades if not centuries away from parity on many fronts, like equal pay for example. That’s just not acceptable. I know there are better, faster ways to get what we need, and our edge is our ability to use data and the enormous power that women wield as 50 percent of the workforce and talent pool and drivers of businesses outperformance to get better support faster.
“We’ve made great strides toward gender equality at work, but there’s still so much to be done”
Q: Does InHerSight benefit employers as well? If so, how?
A: We help companies win with gender diversity. The business case for gender diversity has been made. Companies see the value in diversifying their teams, but they don’t always know how to get there. Our data helps build their roadmap for creating programs, policies, and cultures that are appealing to women from the first time they discover a company through their 10-year anniversary working there.
There’s also something to be said for the power of transparency, which any company leverages when their leadership embraces our data for what it is and takes steps to change. No company is perfect, though some get quite close, and no company’s ratings stay the same over time. Improving low scores and maintaining high ones takes work, and when a company partners with InHerSight, regardless of score, they tell women and their employees they’re open to dialogue and they’re listening. That’s an influential step in diversity and inclusion.
Q: Every woman is different. And with so many different things being important to them within the workplace, how do you narrow down the factors that would be most important to women?
A: We don’t. Our ratings categories cover so many different aspects of work for women, everything from advancement and representation to family growth support and flexibility to safety and respect because our platform is built on the idea that all women are different. A perfect company for you is different from a perfect company from me, and the more we can show each woman how a company is the right fit for her, the better we can mobilize women to apply for positions at companies where they have the greatest chance of finding success. And that’s exactly what our job matching tool does. Women tell us what’s important to them at work, and we use that information to match them to companies that are the right fit. So if, for example, I’m a woman in Seattle looking for tech companies where women feel they are treated equally and have access to great mentorship, I can find that.
Q: What has been the reaction from companies that have rated or reviewed on InHerSight?
A: Overwhelmingly positive. Companies want to be good at this. For the most part they know how important it is to meet female talent where they are and start changing the conversation about their own workplaces in order to attract great candidates. Because workplace reviews in and of themselves aren’t new, they understand how valuable that authentic insight into their cultures is for job-seekers, and most just want to start putting our tools to work to help them attract and recruit more women.
Q: What would you like to see for InHerSight moving forward?
A: Our team, myself included, feels passionately that improvements made for women in the workforce are improvements for everyone. That said, we also know issues of race, age, sexuality, ability, motherhood, and more affect how women are treated at work, and even whether they enjoy the full scope of any strides we make for women. Our end game is gender equality at work, and we want all women to feel the sweeping effects of that advocacy. To ensure that happens, I’d like to be able to use our data to push for workplace equality across more dimensions.
Q: How can women in Canada get started on rating companies on this side of the border?
A: We’d love more ratings from women in Canada! And InHerSight is open to Canadian companies as well. Women from all over the world can and do rate!
Rating is anonymous and easy, taking only approximately 2 minutes. You can rate here
