“There’s a lot of mystery around how much maternity leave or paternity leave a company offers. When you start searching around and looking at corporate websites, that information is really hard to get,” Stacey Delo points out. “Sometimes people don’t even know what the options are at their own companies.”
Delo is trying to take this problem on with a data project on her website, Maybrooks. She and her team are working with companies, scraping public information, and gathering anonymous submissions to compile a database of what policies exist at hundreds of employers. They collect information on paid leave, pump rooms, childcare, and flexible work options. It’s aimed at “transparency and helping women make good decisions at companies they might want to work for,” she said.
Delo started Maybrooks two years ago as a jobs board for people seeking out flexible working options. It was inspired by her own experience. She had worked in media for years and when she got pregnant at 36 assumed she would be out for a matter of weeks and then return to the job that she had worked hard to achieve. “I ended up staying out six months and coming back part time,” she said. She stayed that way through the birth of her second child. “I didn’t want to leave the workforce entirely, but I wanted to be able to be available for my kids a little more for a period of time,” she said. But “when I started looking at options online to help me through that process, I couldn’t really find it.” Maybrooks was her answer, aggregating all kinds of flexible work available for new mothers or anyone else who might be in search of it.
The database is the newest piece of the site. “It seemed like a natural extension of what we were already doing, basically highlighting companies that have flexible cultures,” she said. She and her team talked to women who just couldn’t find the information they needed. “They’re calling up friends of friends when in the hiring process to ask…what are the policies for maternity at that company, because you don’t know and you don’t want to ask during the hiring process,” she said. They talked to women who wind up being the first at their companies to take maternity leave. “So they’re helping craft what it is and what the company’s going to offer.”
“We started to see this need for basically making the information more readily available,” she said. The data project only began at the beginning of the year but already has hundreds of company profiles.
Now those women can look up a potential employer ahead of time or see what other companies in their field offer. “You can be really strategic in making good decisions about where you’re going to work before you even work there,” she pointed out. “So instead of getting blindsided by what a company’s policies are, you can know what they are.”
The aim is not just to help women, but to influence employers. “We hope that it will pressure more companies to change and to offer policies that are good for helping to keep women in the workforce,” she said. Some companies may not yet offer paid leave or flexible work arrangements, but they could look at the database to see what others offer. “You can get a complete picture of similar companies to yours and that could help you craft your own policies,” she said.
Companies that work with Maybrooks to give them information on their policies also see it as a bonus. “It’s a great tool for them to be able to tell the women and families that are working at the companies, ‘Look at what we’re doing.’”
The site isn’t only geared to working mothers — it gathers information on paternity leave, too. “Our site is totally open to anybody, so we absolutely hope that men will take advantage of the site as well,” she said.
The goal is to be a one-stop-shop for any working parents. “Our overall goal is to be that main career resource for moms and families, in the same way you might think of a baby center if you get pregnant or the wedding channel if you get married or Amazon if you want to buy anything,” she said. “That first place that you go.”
The site does have some competition, however. Two others have recently cropped up that also aggregate information about how women are treated at American companies. InHerSight allows people to anonymously rate their workplaces on things that impact many working women, such as paid maternity leave, flexible work options, women’s representation, and opportunities for advancement. And Having It Some is a new Tumblr taking anonymous submissions from employees about what their paid family leave policies look like.
These sites want to fix the problem of an opaque marketplace that may not cater to women’s needs and help women find the information they need while pressuring companies to offer more generous benefits. Just 12 percent of workers get paid family leave, but some companies go as far as offering 22 weeks paid time off to both new moms and dads. Yet mothers women are often penalized at work when they become mothers, making it tricky for them to ask about policies. Instead of asking, they can now turn to any one of these new sites doing the asking for them.