Incredible Brand, Horrible workplace (for full timers)
Pros
Great brand. Incredibly rewarding, and last I was there, high quality programming for the kids. Great for a part time employment (as you can see, summer hires tend to love the experience, but they are separated from the internal organizational structure). If you feel you must work here, stay for 1-2 years and then GTFO while the brand is still good and can advance your career.
Cons
Super stressful work environment, lots of gossip, little incentive to stay beyond helping the kids, which, long term isn't enough. During my time there 100% of all the original staff left when the founder became more than a figure head and the executive director left. This is highly unusual given the successful brand. The model doesn't work so they are constantly restructuring, there is little stability, and even the CEO talks about her employees behind their backs and is very manipulative in terms of choosing favorites and creating tension. Because of poor planning, the work trickles down the hierarchy, and emphasis is put on short term goals, rather than long term, which takes a toll, obviously. CEO is more interested in her own brand than the organization. Since she took over the numbers are falling, kids are dropping out, because they are scaling too quickly (this is information from a current employee about this year's programs). Annual reports ignore this problem by simply not providing data, take a look at them, you'll notice a huge lack of data. For an organization meant to benefit women, this place echoes the values of a particularly catty group of middle schooers. The CEO once told us, during a meeting, not to get pregnant. We were later told it was "just a joke". It didn't feel like a joke, and one of the employees was so offended she called me and cried after the meeting. The CEO privately sat me down at one point to tell me what my supervisors thought of me, not in a constructive, performance review, but as a means for me to come to "her side" as she tried to oust the executive director. My colleagues were given promotions, with a better title, and more work, without compensation adjustment. Lots of excuses, constantly, but things never get better. It is a TOXIC environment because leadership is, frankly, only interested in herself, optics, and having "followers", as she put it herself. They have incredibly unrealistic goals, such as teaching 1 million girls to code by 2020 (which is 1 in 8 girls of the entire american population of middle school and high school aged girls), which is not possible, so they inflate their numbers by counting anyone who ever showed up once to a GWC club meeting, even if that club fails miserably. Oh, classic: when we were defining a values set for the company, and someone mentioned integrity, Reshma, the CEO asked "What do you mean by Integrity?". That statement is all you need to know about Reshma Saujani.