A Note From Our Founders: One Million Women Now Use Fairygodboss Each Month!

Fairygodboss Co-founders Romy Newman and Georgene Huang

Fairygodboss Co-founders Romy Newman and Georgene Huang

Fairygodboss Co-founders Romy Newman and Georgene Huang

Fairygodboss Co-Founders Georgene Huang & Romy Newman
Fairygodboss Co-Founders Georgene Huang & Romy Newman
When we started working on Fairygodboss back in March 2015, we knew we wanted to empower women with information.
Over our combined 25 years in corporate America, we had experienced a range of workplace situations — some good, and some decidedly not. We saw the proliferation of job and company reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. But those reviews just didn’t seem to address the issues that were foremost in our minds, or those of our female friends and colleagues.
Georgene’s personal experience was our No. 1 use case. She had been unexpectedly fired from her executive-level job at Dow Jones as part of a major management shake-up, and she was two months pregnant at the time. She knew that while some companies had positive, inclusive cultures, others (like ones she had seen firsthand on Wall Street) were ones that systematically excluded or even mistreated women. She knew that some companies respected boundaries of personal time, and others drew no such lines. She knew that some offered ample paid parental leave, while others simply relied on short-term disability. But how could she know which were which?
The only way to truly know the answers to these questions was to ask women themselves. Would women anonymously contribute this information — about maternity leave, salaries, company culture, and advancement opportunities — to make a resource for each other? Through the birth of Fairygodboss, we found the answer was a resounding yes.
When we went live, we had only about 100 reviews. Now, we have tens of thousands. We launched with solely user-generated content and went on to build and grow a robust editorial platform that produces multiple original articles a day. At the beginning of 2016, we had only 17,000 monthly unique users…. and last month, we hit a major milestone when we had 1 million women come and visit our site.
One million women visiting the Fairygodboss site in a single month represents a major achievement for us. This time last year, in January 2017, we had 100,000 visitors — meaning we grew 10x in just one year! We are so pleased and excited that we’ve grown so quickly, and we’re glad that our content and services are resonating. As we’ve been told by users time and again, this is a platform women clearly needed.
We’re also proud and humbled that extraordinary U.S. corporations such as Apple, Bank of America, Capital One, Dell, GE, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, PepsiCo, SquareSpace, Target, and UTC have signed on to meet talented female job candidates through our platform, and that they are supporting our work.
Fairygodboss has been an amazing journey, and this is still just the beginning. We’re excited to continue to build our offering so that we become an essential resource for all ambitious and career-minded women.
Since this is a moment of celebration, we want to take the time to thank all the wonderful supporters who have been a part of the journey: our amazing Fairygodboss team; our advisors and mentors; our incredible investor and director Bill Greenblatt, Chairman of Sterling Talent Solutions; our partners; and of course, our husbands and five children. And we want to especially thank YOU, the member of our (quickly growing) Fairygodboss community. Thank you for being part of a platform that is helping to bring power, opportunity and equality to more women.

—Georgene & Romy