NEW YORK – September 25, 2018 – Bain & Company has earned a place on Working Mother's “Working Mother 100 Best Companies” list, which recognizes companies that lead in the areas of female career advancement, paid parental leave, childcare assistance, benefits and flextime. Additionally, Working Mother recognized Bain & Company as a “Top 3 Company for Recruitment, Retention and Advancement” for its commitment to making the firm the best long-term career for the best business talent in the world.

Bain’s gender research suggests that women often face different dynamics in the workplace, given unconscious bias and cultural norms, as well as different dynamics outside of work, where they are more likely to have significant others with equally or more intense jobs and to be primary caregivers if they have children. While many organizations talk about setting their employees up for success, Bain & Company sets a higher bar for itself: to ensure that all employees – especially the firm’s women and mothers – not only succeed, but thrive both personally and professionally. Thriving is about growing, developing vigorously, and flourishing even with the different professional and personal dynamics that they often face. For Bain & Company this also means striving for true parity across all employees with a focus on the firm’s affinity groups.

“This recognition reinforces the many investments we make to ensure our working mothers, and all women, are not only succeeding but, in fact, thriving in both their professional and personal lives,” said Jen Hayes, a partner with Bain & Company and chair of the firm’s Global Women's Leadership Council (GWLC). “Our GWLC drives these investments, continually working to create, enable and embed the right programmatic and cultural initiatives that support and retain our women over long-term careers. We recognize that we still have a long ways to go towards true parity in the workplace, but we have a vision and a path to get there.”

One new program that falls under this path, as a part of Bain & Company’s broader diversity and inclusion efforts, is the unconscious bias training program that was rolled out globally across the firm’s 57 offices in 2018. The new flagship program, which acknowledges that unconscious bias still affects the day-to-day lives of many working women and mothers, seeks to ensure that Bain & Company employees have an equal playing field in their careers. The firm recognizes that it is critical to invest fully in creating a culture of inclusion and, as a result, is investing in a broad effort to mitigate unconscious bias, which requires an intensive and targeted set of dialogues, training, and planning with employees.

“We’re very excited to roll out programs like unconscious bias training in our offices,” said Tamar Dane Dor-Ner, a partner with the Bain & Company and managing partner of the firm’s Boston-based headquarters. “We know they aren’t unilateral solutions but they take on important and persistent issues, and the risks of leading and testing and trying are so much smaller than the risks of waiting for something easier to come along.  I am proud to work at a company that is constantly asking how it can be better and taking concrete actions to self-correct.”

In addition to Bain & Company’s corporate recognition, Working Mother also recognized Emily Frasier, a manager in the firm’s Atlanta office, as a Working Mother of the Year. Frasier exemplifies the passion, leadership and resilience of being a working mother at Bain & Company and is someone who has thrived in her career at the firm. Along with her client work, she is extremely active in both Women at Bain and Blacks at Bain (BABs) initiatives and has provided leadership for diversity recruiting efforts as well as helping to build a strong BABs community in the Atlanta office, engaging the Atlanta leadership and wider office in promoting inclusion through education and celebration.

The 100 Best Companies application includes more than 400 questions on leave policies, workforce representation, benefits, childcare, advancement programs, flexibility policies and more. It surveys the availability and usage of these programs, as well as the accountability of the many managers who oversee them. All applicants receive feedback showing how they compare with other applicants; however, the names of applicants that do not make the list are kept confidential. Company profiles and data come from submitted applications and reflect 2017 data.

The complete list of the 2018 Working Mother 100 Best Companies can be found here.

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