Best Industries For Women

Woman at work

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Fairygodboss
Fairygodboss
Updated: 12/15/2017
At Fairygodboss, we're privileged to hear the intimate thoughts and experiences of so many women in the workplace. The stories of individual women are at the heart of what we do, but we've also come to see patterns across the chorus of these women's voices.
Specifically, we've recently looked at a large sample of our community's reviews and realized that there are important patterns based on the industry a woman works in. Here are 3 interesting things we discovered:
1. Traditionally female-dominated industries are also the ones women in our community perceive there to be the most gender equality. PR, cosmetics and hospitality, for example, rank very highly for gender equality in our community.
2. While traditionally male-dominated industries tend to rank more poorly for gender equality in general, there are still important differences between them. Technology and financial services, for example, end up being in the middle of the pack of the 30 industries we analyzed. This surprised us given how much attention these industries tend to get for purportedly difficult work environments and lack of diversity.

3. We've previously found that gender equality is certainly strongly correlated to women's job satisfaction, but women were also very satisfied in industries such as Consulting Services, Information Services and Pharmaceuticals where gender equality doesn't necessarily rank the absolute highest. An employee's overall job satisfaction is based on many inputs, so it is understandable that gender equality is only one factor among others.
So how does gender equality in an industry manifest itself? Well, we took a closer look at the Public Relations industry because it ranked so well on all counts (job satisfaction, gender equality, and as an industry women would recommend to other women).
What we found in the following two review excerpts is quite revealing (and instructive) for employers who would like to hear examples of what gender equality looks like in the workplace.
“[Ogilvy PR] is predominantly female, at least in the New York office. Women are well represented in the senior leadership, both the Managing Director and CCO are impressive (female) individuals.”
Another woman wrote of her experience at Edelman:
"There are quite a few women here; in fact, the office is predominantly female. That, however, is indicative of the industry as a whole (PR / Marketing / Communications) . There seems to be a solid mix of men and women in high-level roles." 

Our complete findings by industry can be found in our presentation.

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