What Are The Best Companies For Women? Facebook, Google And Netflix Make Top 10, According To Survey

Women looking for equal opportunities, solid salaries, female leaders and generous maternity leave shouldn’t fear the tech industry’s boys’ club image, as some of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms are among the top 10 female-friendly companies, according to a new study.

The construction management software company Procore Technologies Inc. ranked second, while Facebook Inc., computer software firm Netsuite Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Google Inc. rounded out the sixth, seventh eighth and ninth ranks, women’s job-ratings site InHerSight found.

Those tech companies’ high spots on the list, which relied on a snapshot of InHerSight’s ratings data from 27,000 firms, stemmed from their success in all categories, making them outliers among Silicon Valley firms, which normally perform extraordinarily well in some areas and very poorly in others, according to Ursula Mead, the site’s chief executive.

“In a lot of ways, for women in tech, there are a lot of great things going on,” Mead said, adding that generous maternity leave policies and high salary satisfaction often drove Silicon Valley firms up in the rankings, while for career advancement and representation in leadership, they were frequently among the lowest perfomers.

The study’s top performers were large, but not necessarily high-profile companies, despite Big Tech taking up about half of the top 10. Title insurance company Title Source Inc. ranked first, followed by Procore, the Boston Consulting Group, financial news site The Motley Fool and Netflix Inc. In tenth was the Arlington, Virginia-based corporate advisory service CEB Inc.

Other women-focused rankings, such as those by Fortune, the National Association for Female Executives and FairyGodBoss, a ratings company similar to InHerSight, also listed predominantly companies that had more than 1,000 employees.

Asked if size had anything to do with higher rankings—eight of the 10 firms had more than 1,000 employees, and Motley Fool, with the lowest, had between 200 and 500, according to LinkedIn—Mead noted that companies with greater resources were better equipped to afford long maternity leave policies and higher salaries for their employees. The InHerSight study, she pointed out, used the sheer number of companies at its disposal to avoid bias that may come with focusing on big, visible firms.

Still, she added, size shouldn’t determine a company’s treatment of women.

“It doesn’t take additional resources to make sure that there isn’t bias,” Mead said. “It doesn’t take additional resources to make sure there are leadership opportunities for women.”

CORRECTION: 10:52 a.m., Jan. 25 — An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that tech companies in the InHerSight Top 10 list performed poorly in some areas. While this is true of most firms in the industry, those in the Top 10 list performed well in all areas. The story has been updated reflect that fact.