Speaker: Georgene Huang, Co-Founder & CEO, Fairygodboss
What inspired you to start your company?
Georgene Huang: I was inspired to start Fairygodboss after a bad experience at work. A few years ago, I was suddenly fired in a management shakeup while I was two months pregnant. I was interested in my job search in things like what a company is maternity leave policy was and whether they had women in management roles and what were the culture was like. But I didn't feel like I could ask about any of those things openly Fairygodboss, today is the largest career community for women. You can read job reviews for women by women. You can network safely and constructively with other women who have shared experiences, and all of this is a free platform reaching millions of women every month.
Why is Women’s History Month important to you?
Georgene Huang: Typically, Women's History Month is a time of celebration at Fairygodboss. But between the record high women's unemployment numbers and the tragic losses due to the pandemic, and the impact of isolation and burn out by women struggling to balance elder care, child care, their own careers, this year looks very different. It's more important than ever to advocate for gender equality in the workplace, and I'm using this month as an opportunity to highlight different ways to support women at work. Through a Fairygodboss job search boot camp we're offering for free to individuals in our community, we're helping to coach and mentor women who've lost their jobs due to Covid. We're helping them to find a new one they love. And every day the Fairygodboss platform creates transparency into workplace cultures and helps women find support. We advocate for flexible work environments, equal pay and paid parental leave.
What is your most important diversity goal for women in your organization?
Georgene Huang: Promoting and maintaining a diverse, inclusive environment is critical to our mission of creating better workplaces for everyone. We have committed to four key actions at Fairygodboss to ensure our company practices what it preaches. The first is sharing our internal employee demographic metrics publicly and updating them bi-annually. Second, we have revised our recruiting and hiring policies to ensure diverse candidate slates, and we've set concrete, measurable goals for improving our company's internal diversity. Third, we've instituted a new content creation process for all of our community content that incorporates representation standards covering images, editorial sources and role model profiles. Lastly, we have mandated bias and DEI training for our employees and started an internal volunteer pace group that's focused on providing relevant resources and facilitating inclusive cultural discussions.
What is the biggest challenge for the next generation of women as they begin their careers?
Georgene Huang: For anyone reentering the workforce, and especially for women beginning their careers, the labor markets become increasingly competitive and recruiters simply don't have much time to read through resumes carefully. So the challenge is making yourself stand out. As millions have shifted to remote working over the past year, soft skills like self management and good communication has become more important than ever, but they're notoriously difficult to highlight. on a resume. Resumes should be impact oriented rather than simply a list of activities. And making sure those impact accomplishments read between the lines to reflect ability to self project management, productivity and good communication can be helpful. Overall, The advice I give a young woman starting her career now is that hiring decisions still happen by human beings and human beings are fundamentally relationship driven. So relationship building and network management is something to start practicing as a regular habit. It's never too early or too late to start.
