Alumna Keeps Women’s Employment Issues InHerSight

As the Smith School celebrates it’s annual Women’s Week, March 28-April 1, one Smith alumna is encouraging women to rate the female-friendliness of their workplaces. Kate Ward, MBA ’04, was president of the Graduate Women in Business club while at Smith.

Now she’s asking women in the Smith community to participate in a new ratings site she’s working on, InHerSight. The platform asks women to rate their employers based on 14 criteria that women have identified as important — things like salary satisfaction, mentorship opportunities, women in leadership positions, maternity leave policies and benefits. Broadly, the ratings are grouped around career opportunities, family support and personal growth.

“InHerSight is about taking individual experiences that might be anecdotal on a small scale and raising them through the cumulative capacity of crowd-sourced data to create actionable data,” Ward says. “When women can share individual insights, that can bring a lot of transparency to what’s going on in specific companies.”

After graduating from Smith, Ward went to do product management and product development for The Motley Fool, a consumer financial company that offers advice and education for individual investors.

She spent the past four years as a stay-at-home mom, but when a former Motley Fool colleague, Ursula Mead, contacted her about a new venture she was launching, Ward jumped at the chance to be involved.

Ward is working on developing partner and employer relationships to help grow the business.

“Right now, we have thousands of women coming to the site every day to rate and explore companies,” Ward says. The site currently has more than 6,000 companies that have been rated in the database. In January 2016, InHerSight released a matchmaker tool, which allows individuals to select the criteria they care about most to filter through the database and create a personalized top-companies list. Soon, employers will also be able to post jobs.

“When I was graduating from business school, this would have been a great resource,” Ward says.

She was excited about Smith’s 50/50 by 2020 campaign, a pledge announced in spring 2015 by school leadership to push for women to make up at least 50 percent of incoming students by 2020.

“It’s a great goal and it’s definitely doable,” Ward says. She says business schools should strive to have better representation of female professors and leaders to attract more women applicants. It is also important to have support communities for women at business schools. Mentorship programs that engage the alumni community and help women learn things about their careers are also important.

“When you look at business schools, many fall into that traditional 70-30 split that most tech and financial companies have,” Ward says. “It’s really great to see that push being made at the business school level. Because of course — as many others have discussed and studied — the more women in management roles in companies, the better.”