Thirty years ago, Working Mother set out on a bold mission: to demand that companies not only offer family-friendly benefits, but also compete to be the best at it. We recruited as many companies as we could to participate, asking them to reveal how many women worked there and in what roles. We asked about their maternity leave, child care and flex offerings. The best employers were starting to think about these issues, while others needed a bit of coaxing to apply.
Only 30 companies that first year were good enough to be called Best.
Today, with hundreds of companies competing yearly for inclusion in Working Mother 100 Best Companies, the four primary pillars--advancement of women, paid parental leave, child care and flex-- still hold up our efforts. Yet so much has changed.
Take child care: Three decades ago, the gold standard was an on-site facility, and five of the Best Companies offered it. These days, Best Companies feature an array of child care benefits -- from sick-child and backup care to business travel reimbursements, summer camps and, yes, daily child care -- because they know how important these are to working parents.
And then there's flex, the No. 1 policy working moms covet. Thirty years ago, workplace flex meant the ability to shift your hours to start a little earlier or a little later in the day. Today, flex comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and the Best Companies all offer it. An average of 74 percent of employees use basic flextime, but these organizations also focus on ways to individualize flexible work offerings to best serve all of their employees and business.
Paid leave has also grown significantly. In the late 1980s, most of the Best Companies offered about six weeks of partially paid maternity leave. Today, every one offers fully paid maternity leave, and the average number of weeks of parental leave offered is eight for moms, three for dads and five for adoptive parents -- numbers that will only continue to rise. (Today, some Best Companies have even hit the 13-week mark for all new parents.)
These changes prove the dramatic shift in the American workplace mindset that the Best Companies and Working Mother have helped to foster. In 1986, issues of our magazine talked about the anxiety working moms had about even acknowledging that they had kids at home, for fear of being "mommy-tracked." Today, while that fear has not completely melted away, the need to cover your tracks as a working mother is not so dire.
This openness has trickled down to support other employee groups as well, from working dads to people caring for aging parents, from employees with disabilities to those with chronic illnesses. Working mothers have long served as a workplace vanguard, raising issues of caregiving, flexibility, paid leave and advancement first.
At Working Mother, we are proud to see that these policies serve all employees. Thirty years is an important milestone, and we are happy to honor it. But we know, too, that the road ahead to truly supportive workplaces for all employees remains long. Today, more than two million people work at a Best Company. It's a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket when you consider that our nation is home to 24 million working mothers--70 percent of moms with kids under age 18 are employed.
During the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, as the rhetoric soars to new heights, Working Mother and the Working Mother 100 Best Companies, will keep their feet on the ground, continually pushing the nation's employers and our governments to support working parents and all employees with the benefits and policies they need to thrive at work and at home.
Paid family leave, paid sick days, wage equality, flexibility, affordable child care, women's advancement: These are the issues that have mattered to working families for three decades -- and will continue to do so. As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Working Mother 100 Best Companies, we look forward to another 30 years of competition that will advance the work life conversation into a new realm -- one in which all companies will strive to be a part.