Do you realize the power you wield to change the world?
Women represent 85% of the purchasing power in the United States and worldwide hold trillions of dollars of wealth.
What are you doing with this power?
I advocate you pay attention to where you put your money through purchases, investments, and even payroll in your company to make sure your part of the solution to ensuring women have equal access to jobs, opportunities for advancement and access to capital to start and grow businesses in parity with their male peers. You may not realize it, but white women still make 78 cents to every dollar men make in the same jobs. Hispanic and black women fair even worse!
The Anita Borg Institute has created a list of the top 13 companies in the world for women to work and advance. Although you may not want a tech job at one of these firms, knowing that they employ and advance women is good info when making purchase decisions. ABI investigated 35 companies with almost half a million employees and ranked them on women at entry, mid and senior positions. They also looked at recruitment and promotion of women.
Based on their findings, here is your go to list for personal and business choices (not in ranked order):
- BNY Melon (investment company)
- Accenture (management consulting)
- American Express (yep, possibly in your wallet)
- Apple
- eBay
- GoDaddy
- Goldman Sachs (another investment firm)
- IBM
- Rackspace Hosting (cloud management)
- Salesforce (cloud computing)
- T. Rowe Price (investment firm)
- USAA (insurance)
The list may not be part of your standard purchases, but it is a start. It makes me interested in looking for information about women in leadership positions in consumer product companies, as well as other categories of companies that will help us make informed choices.
