10 Great Companies For Women In 2015

Are you ready to take Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and lean into an executive position at a top company? We’ve got a list of 10 places where you may have an easier time climbing the career ladder.

The National Association for Female Executives (NAFE), a division of Working Mother magazine publisher Working Mother Media, has just released its annual list of the top 50 companies for executive women. From that list, NAFE highlights 10 companies it says are the “best” for women. They aren’t ranked from one to ten. They’re all considered to be great places for women to work and advance. Our slideshow above shows those ten companies, in alphabetical order.

Women still have a long way to go until they are well-represented in corporate leadership. Only 4.6% of the 1,000 largest U.S. companies have female CEOs. That’s the same number as last year. Even among the top 50 companies on NAFE’s list, only five have women in the top job. “It’s been a stubborn number,” says Working Mother Media vice president Subha Barry. Even while 40% of employees in those companies are so-called professional women on a track to senior management, among the executive ranks, the share is just 19%. “Unless you get that number to be bigger, how will you get women in the pipeline for CEO?”

The 50 companies on NAFE’s list are all places where women are progressing more quickly than in the rest of corporate America. People in leadership posts at these firms have decided to make women’s advancement a priority, through sponsorship and mentoring programs, goal-setting and hiring initiatives.

To be considered for NAFE’s list, companies need a minimum of two women on their boards and at least 1,000 employees in the U.S. NAFE chooses the top 50 based on women’s representation at all levels, employees’ access to and use of programs and policies that promote women’s advancement, training opportunities and managers’ accountability. NAFE sends out invitations to 1,000 companies. To participate, a firm must fill out a lengthy form with some 200 questions. NAFE chose the 50 best companies from the 250 firms that responded.

IBM stands out because it’s the only one of the top 10 with a female CEO. In 2011 the century-old tech giant tapped Virginia Rometty for the top job. IBM also has an impressive share of female senior managers, 29%, and 26% of its executives are women, according to NAFE. Those are strong numbers given than 30% of its 431,000 worldwide employees are women. IBM even goes after female executives who have left the company through something called the Reconnections initiative, which offers continuing education and networking. In addition to flagging IBM as a member of its top 10 companies for women, NAFE puts IBM in its “hall of fame” because the company has been cooperating with the survey and landing in the top 50 companies for 15 out of the 17 years NAFE has put out the list.

Johnson & Johnson is another standout. For 20 years the pharma, medical device and consumer products multinational has had something called the Women’s Leadership Initiative, which has grown to 50 chapters nationwide and works to advance women inside J&J. In 2013 the company introduced the Executive Forum, a kind of support and networking group made up of the 100 top female leaders in the company who work on accelerating their own careers while also sponsoring junior women and promoting recently hired women. Of the company’s 38,000 U.S. employees, nearly half, 45%, are women, and of those, 40% are senior managers. Three women sit on the company’s 13-member board.

Ernst & Young is another standout. Last year was the first the professional services giant participated in the survey and it went straight to the top 10 list. Some 46% of its 31,000 employees are women and 46% of senior managers are female. The company has a sponsorship program, which is like a mentorship on steroids, where partners advocate for women in their groups and help them get promoted. Example: Beth Brooke, EY’s global vice chair of public policy, works to get women slots on highly visible projects.

One company to watch that didn’t make the top 10 list but is showing promise for women, according to Barry: chemical maker DuPont. The company has had a female CEO and chair, Ellen Kullman, 59, since 2009 and in an age when quotas are frowned upon, it has set a numerical goal in 2014 of increasing by 5% the size of its female and multicultural workforce by 2017. “It’s easy in the STEM space to make excuses about why your company doesn’t measure up,” notes Barry. “But DuPont’s CEO has challenged her organization to boost its female workforce by a concrete number.”

NAFE’s goal with the list is to signal to women where the best opportunities are. For junior women trying to figure out where they might find the most hospitable atmospher for advancement, the list includes companies that will nurture and promote them. For women who are midway through their careers, the list can help them make up their minds about a lateral move. Though the list is a good news story for women, Barry still sees a gulf between the promise of women’s leadership and the reality. “It’s been numerically proven that diversity of thought and approach will help mitigate risk and create better outcomes for your business,” she says. “Yet why is it that the number of women at the top of the executive ranks remains stubbornly where it’s been for many years?” If all companies would follow the examples set by the top companies on the NAFE list, that would start to change.