In Her Sight with Ursula Mead
Longtime listeners of the podcast will know that I’ve had my fair share of stories from being one of the only women on the trading floor, early in my career. I think feeling safe, or at least aware, of what your workplace culture will be like before you start is important.
There are a lot of websites where you can read reviews about potential employers and get an insight into what the company culture is like, but what if there was a site that reviewed how female friendly a potential workplace was?
Joining me today is Ursula Mead, the cofounder and CEO of InHerSight — a website where women can evaluate jobs and companies and get help finding a company that is the right fit.
What Are We Drinking?
Ursula — Raspberry and Lime Spindrift
Shannon — Black Cherry Schweppes
Podcast Notes
Ursula comes from a financial tech and media background, and she has a long history in product management.
This field is a lot of looking at data and user behavior and working with engineers and technologists to build new products.
She worked for a company that built everything from stock recommendation engines to tools that helped you get started in investing. They also built a lot of back end internal systems.
Over the years she came to love being a woman in tech.
When Ursula became a new mom, she started to follow the conversation about women in the workplace and some of the challenges that women face at work, whether around advancement or support around a growing family, or safety and sexual harassment.
She became very fascinated with the data and the lack of technology products in that space. Out of passion and interest, she started to think about if we were to design technology solutions to try to tackle some of the gender inequality we still have, what could those look like?
Ultimately, those were the driving forces behind launching InHerSight. This is a site where women rate how female friendly their companies are and they review their employers on 16 different factors. The site takes all of that data and uses it to help women evaluate jobs and companies to find workplaces that are the right fit.
Every workplace is different and has their own strengths and weaknesses. Every workplace is at a different phase of its lifecycle. Some are just getting started and may not have all the benefits that would be great for working moms. Some are at a much later stage and may have lost touch with some of the systems they need in place to create some of that more respectful work environment or deal with the safety issues.
Just like every company is different, so is every woman. We all have different goals and definitions of success and we are all looking for different things.
We need this additional level of insight so we can find the right company for us. What you may want in your 20s may be different than what you want in your 30s.
You need to be able to assess what is important to you right now, if you getting it where you are working, and, if not, where you can find it.
On the InHerSight, companies are rated from one to five.
A great company isn’t necessarily a five. They are usually in the high fours. There are no perfect companies, because there is always something to work on.
There are a couple of companies that are standouts in every industries. Ursula loves to highlight Procore Technologies and Palo Alto Networks, because not a lot of women have heard of them and they are great companies for women in tech.
There are a lot of different lists on the site to sift through. To reinforce the idea that different companies are right for different women, the way the site works is that women tell the site about themselves, what field they are in, and what type of company they are looking for. InHerSight then looks through more than 100,000 companies that they have scorecards and job information for and they make personalized recommendations.
You can look at companies from A to Z with scores from top to bottom. There are some companies that are lagging and there is quite a bit of work to be done for them to support women. There are a lot of companies in retail, manufacturing, and transportation, as well as companies that are in more male dominated fields, that tend to have more areas they need to work on.
You hear a lot about finance and tech.
Shannon has clients that are engineers for large companies that have talked about how challenging it is to work for those companies.
Shannon did a five-city tour with the team at Bacardi. It was an event focused on women in the food and beverage industry. It was very eye opening.
She heard so much from the women about the challenges and how they are treated. Bars are designed to not be as female friendly, because women aren’t as tall as men. The way a bar is designed, a woman can’t reach the liquor, when it is stacked above.
Ursula hears the less-told stories. Food and beverage is an area that gets much less air time than other industries.
It is so important have a platform to reach and help women in every industry, in every area of the country, otherwise we will leave a lot of very robust industries behind.
If you want to work in a male-dominated industry, it is kind of like deciding to move to France. You like the culture, the food, the wine, and you think it will be a great place for you. Then you move there only to realize that 85 percent are men and they speak French, and you thought you could speak English there. You could either (a) start speaking French to survive and adjust to your environment, (b) you get frustrated and leave, or (c) you build a colony of English speakers so you have a safe community and feel supported.
Women are 50 percent of the workforce and talent pool. The business case for gender diversity has been very well established. We improve business performance, we improve productivity, and we can reduce your likelihood of fraud. When there is gender diversity, the results improve.
Companies need people and need to be competitive. They can’t afford to miss out on 50 percent of the workforce. If companies want to attract women as talent, they have to have the things women care about and they need to support the things that are important to women.
First, we need to expose what is happening at companies and what they offer, and we need to make the ability for a woman to choose where she is going to go based on data that is readily available.
InHerSight has data from more than 100,000 companies in the U.S. It is great, but it is just a start. The more information available the more powerful it will be for women.
Companies can begin to change when they see the data. Companies cannot just have the “right” policies and numbers in place. It isn’t that you have 16 weeks of maternity leave put in place, it is also important for women to know if they still have their job when they come back and if they are still on the same career trajectory. Are they pressured to come back earlier?
You can have 50 percent of women in leadership and women still may not be happy with the representation. Maybe those women aren’t included in the important conversations, maybe they are not really engaged. Other women in the organization may feel like they will not be able to reach that same level themselves.
It is the satisfaction with the company that is even more important.
Ursula sees companies that have below par policies and below par stats that have higher satisfaction than companies that offer ridiculously generous benefits and have perfect numbers on paper.
It is the combination of the hard facts of a company and how women are experiencing those facts on the ground. That’s where you get at how the workplace is for women.
It doesn’t matter if you have 18 weeks of maternity leave if you come back and it is an awful work environment.
Some of the bigger companies will do all of the right things on paper, but how it plays out institutionally is another story.
You spend most of your time at work, and if it is an unhealthy relationship, you need to do something about it.
This can play out in your finances. Not only will you have the health and physical stress, Shannon finds that clients spend more money when they are in a bad work situation to help them feel better.
InHerSight does interesting one-off studies, and in one case they explored the effect of financial confidence, or lack of, on women’s careers and how they behave financially. How does their own assessment of their financial knowledge affect the gender pay gap or lack of women leadership.
One of the things they learned was that 43 percent of women surveyed were stressed about their finances. They felt regular stress about their financial situation. That stress impacted not only their career choices, but their career paths.
If you are financially stressed, you are more likely to leave your company, even if you don’t have another job lined up.
These women are more uncomfortable trying to advance their careers at their companies. Maybe they will go back to school or try to look for another job, but they essentially try to remove themselves from that situation, instead of trying to change the situation first either at that company or getting something lined up before leaving.
The other side of the spectrum was that when women feel confident and knowledgeable about their finances, they are significantly more likely to do the things that would help bridge some of the numbers they see.
For example, if you feel knowledgeable about your finances, you are more likely to ask for a raise. You are also more likely to ask for, and raise your hand for, an internal promotion. You are also more likely to apply for more internal opportunities at companies.
How can companies improve their retention of women or women in leadership numbers? Some of it is around providing better support and resources, like access to the Financial Gym, in order to help women gain financial confidence and knowledge and be able to feel comfortable raising their hands for these things that will help them on the right career path.
If you are financially stressed, you are more likely to make a decision that makes you more financially stressed.
The number one mission at the Gym is financial literacy.
The Gym works with companies to provide financial literacy to their employees. The overall issue is employees managing their day-to-day finances. A raise will not necessarily make a situation better.
Most clients come to the Gym to learn how they can live off of less. They want to figure out how to pay off their bills and not be stressed.
Ursula previously worked for a company that empowered individuals to invest directly in stocks. Predominantly the users were male. They talked a lot about how to specifically engage women in investing and how to get them interested and active. There were no easy answers.
Ursula felt lucky that financial education and investing were front and center, because that is how she got her education. Had she not worked for that company, she would not have learned everything she has about managing her financial future.
Places like the Financial Gym are critical for financial education.
One of the biggest lessons she learned is that as women a lot of our temperament and inclinations make us better investors. We have a lot of natural propensity to do investing well. We are better at controlling our emotions around finances.
We are better at not making reactionary mistakes and not panicking when the stock market is crashing. We are less likely to sell all of our stocks and lock in losses. We are longer term thinkers, we trade less, we benefit from the buy and hold philosophy, we don’t have overconfidence issues. We ask more questions, better questions, and we do more research. The way we approach things sets us up better as investors.
One of the big turning points for Ursula is that investing in individual stocks is a lot like shopping. She could think of the products she had experience with and she could build her relationship with that stock based on very tangible interactions she has had. It became much more real.
Confidence comes from education. The biggest challenge with women and money is they don’t feel confident in a lot the decisions they are making because they don’t feel like they are making educated decisions, because they don’t have an education on the decisions they are making.
If you don’t know where to go to open an investment account, or how to open an investment account, you are not going to feel confident doing it.
It is critical being in a job where you feel safe and supported and that you feel highly confident in the financial choices you are making. Every financial decision you make adds up over time. You are making financial decisions every day of your life.
There are so many great websites and podcasts out there around personal finance. If there is an area you don’t feel good about in your financial situation, invest your time and energy to get the education and feel good about it.
Everything we do financially is fixable, but don’t keep making bad decisions. It is a matter of how much energy it takes to fix them.
Go to www.InHerSight.com and anonymously rate your company or get matched to a new, better opportunity.
TAKEAWAY: My biggest takeaway is that where you work is a relationship and you should feel comfortable in your work setting. As someone looking for a new position, you have the power and tools, like this website, to find a job that offers you the benefits and culture that works for you.
Random Three Questions
What do you do to relax?
If this was your last night on earth, what would be your last meal?
What is a movie you can watch over and over again?
Connect with Ursula
Website: www.InHerSight.com
Twitter/LinkIn/Instagram: @InHerSight
If you’d like to talk to my team at the Financial Gym to help you set big, crazy goals that you’d like to achieve, I hope you’ll reach out to us. Ninety percent of our clients achieve their goals within a year of working with us. The great news is that Martinis and Your Money listeners get 15% off Financial Gym services. So head over to, or send friends to, financialgym.com to get signed up today.