Working Mother Media Starts Research Institute

When Working Mother launched the Working Mother 100 Best Companies initiative in 1986, it was the first survey of what would become a wide range of different reports and research on women in the workforce from Working Mother Media. Now 25 years later, the company, which includes Working Mother magazine, has created the Working Mother Research Institute.

"Since our acquisition by Bonnier, we have been able to launch new initiatives and partner with more companies on primary research to the point where we realized our research business needed its own brand," says Jennifer Owens, director for the Working Mother Research Institute. "We created the brand last fall as part of our 25th anniversary celebration of the Working Mother 100 Best Companies."

The WMRI serves as a backbone connecting the editorial, conferences, marketing, sales and benchmarking businesses for Working Mother Media and its two divisions, Diversity Best Practices, which serves a corporate membership through research, publications and events, and the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), which also publishes its own magazine and research.

"One goal of the WMRI is to grow Working Mother's powerful research capabilities as well as partner with researchers and corporations worldwide to create products that will make a different in the lives of women worldwide," says Owens. "The other is to monetize the power of Working Mother research, which is an essential element of our own corporate DNA."

Under WMRI, many current benchmarking reports will continue, including the flagship Working Mother 100 Best Companies, NAFE's Top Companies for Female Executives and the Diversity Best Practices Assessment & Benchmarking Tool, among others. But a wide range of new benchmarking and reports will also be released, including on Best Companies for Women's Advancement, Best Companies for Kids, a global Diversity Best Practices Assessment & Benchmarking Tool and the book The Flex Primer: The Agile Workforce and Workplace.

"We'll also be publishing new global research on the Advancement of Women in China," says Owens. "This groundbreaking research paper will include data from a new survey of women and working mothers in China and will detail must-know trends for HR executives."

Working Mother works closely with corporations to create its reports. "For our Best Companies initiatives, companies must fill out applications to be considered for our editorial lists," says Owens. Companies that apply receive a one-page scorecard of their results, but also have the opportunity to purchase benchmarking reports that show how they performed against all winners across all questions. The reports go into a great deal of detail and require some commitment from companies. "For instance, the Working Mother 100 Best Companies application includes more than 650 questions."

Corporate support of the research is also key. "We also work with companies as sponsors on our primary research projects," says Owens. Sponsors have included IBM, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Wellstar, P&G, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others.

Much of the research then ends up in Working Mother or NAFE magazines. "The Best Companies and Top Companies initiatives result in lists that are published in the corresponding magazines," says Owens. "Each winner is profiled in the magazine and online and we also create an editorial package for our readers that focuses on their biggest concerns at work and home. As part of that editorial package, we highlight what some of our winning companies are doing to address those problems as well the lessons they've learned and the challenges that remain."