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job board ceos break glass ceiling

Mon, Aug 11, 2008

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In a recent survey from CareerBuilder.com, 34 percent of women said that they feel they are paid less than their male counterparts. This number remains relatively unchanged from the same survey conducted in previous years.

New job boards and networking forums have been created by women, for women, to help bridge this gap and to establish a place where women can find jobs, explore diversity issues, and enrich their present careers with advice from colleagues.

Shannon Davis, founder and CEO of BeyondMotherhood.com, a niche job board, said she created her site specifically for moms who would like to explore their worth outside of the realm of motherhood.

“We realized that the job search is just one small aspect of moms’ lives,” Davis said. “So we use our blog to connect them with various experts from childcare, to time management, to finances.”

Davis said she didn’t want the almost 2,000 registered moms on her site to see only corporate and administrative jobs when accessing her site. “We allow them to connect with all types of opportunities. In less than a year, we had more than 600 registered employers ranging from Tiffany & Co., to the Cleveland Clinic, to tech start-ups looking for a moms’ sales force.”

Harleen Kahlon, a former attorney and Founder of DamselsInSuccess.com, said she created the networking forum and job site after she noticed a lack of professional advancement opportunities for women. She began having conversations with recruiters about how valuable gender initiatives are to companies and how recruiters are tasked to help fill those diversity mandates.

“I wanted to built a site that was multi-faceted, that provides women with not just content and job opportunities but also acts as an interesting value proposition not only to women but to employers,” Kahlon said. “My wish was to create a full-service destination site for professional women, who can talk about returning to work after parenting, or gender issues in the workplace, or discuss business opportunities.”

Kahlon said it’s been a tough site to market, especially without a good amount of financing to generate visibility in front of women. “There aren’t a lot of searches that women perform that are unique to them today,” she said. “That’s not to say that they don’t love the site. It’s just been hard to find that audience.”

Despite these challenges, Kahlon said that their traffic has been growing steadily, especially with a boost from their social network and the 70 bloggers that write for the site daily. She also keeps a number of employment lawyers close at hand to answer questions from women who have been plagued by sexual harassment or other legal barriers in the workplace.

“It’s still a highly bootstrap operation,” she said. “Long-term, we’re just really focused on generating visibility for the site. But women are becoming incentivized to tell other women about us.”

 

 





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This post was written by:

Vanessa Dennis - who has written 202 posts on Cheezhead.

Vanessa Dennis, originally from Austin, Texas, was a corporate recruiter for two years before becoming a writer for Cheezhead.com. Vanessa has an English Writing degree from Loyola University of New Orleans. She currently lives with her family in Cleveland.

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